Good morning to you all fellow gamers and gamedevs!I am proud to announce that BorderStrain, my Open-World 2D ARPG is now listed as Coming Soon on Steam and we will now be starting invited Beta Testing!
The Steam page can be found at:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1007070/BorderStrain/The Webpage for the game can be found at:
www.BorderStrain.com BorderStrain is a Multiplayer 2D Open-World ARPG developed by me alone. This is my first game developed and released so it is quite a learning experience! Working on a limited budget and doing all the graphical assets as well as engine building and game-design all by myself has meant that development has taken quite some time but I think it is now time to start sharing the game and getting some invaluable feedback to keep improving it in preparation for launch!
The game is programmed in C++ using OpenGL
I am currently looking for active and eager Beta Testers to join in helping geting the game ready for launch! If you would like to join Beta Testing there are a few checkpoints that I would like you to take a look at before sending your request to join Beta Testing
Checklist:1 ) This is still Closed Beta, as such I expect you to honour this and keep any gameplay suggestions, bug reporting, reviewing etc within the Beta Testing Group only until we are ready for public testing, reviewing etc
2 ) Both Single Player testers and Multiplayer Groups up to 5 People are invited. As the number of Beta Testing Slots are limited initially any group which will also test in Multiplayer will take precedence. If you want to join Beta Testing as a Multiplayer Group, please send all details in a single request mail.
3 ) If you join as a solo tester, please state in your join request if you would be interested in being paired up for multiplayer testing or if you simply want to try the game out in Single Player mode
4 ) The webpage is being reorganized right now and have a closed forum which will be accessable by all Beta Testers. If the forum is too limited for feedback, experience sharing etc we will organize a Discord server but for starters we will use the BorderStrain Forums.
5 ) Please be aware that since this entire game has been a solo development with a custom engine there will be bugs! Although I have tried to to as much debugging and playtesting as possible I am sure (and actually hoping!) that you will discover more bugs. Please keep this in mind and I will work as hard as possible to correct any bugs found while playtesting
6 ) The game comes with a custom Map-Maker which can be used to make sharable custom expansions which can be selected upon starting a new Server. Please state in your request email if you would be interested in using the Map-Maker to try to design your own custom expansion
7 ) One prerequisite for being allowed to keep you Beta Key after release and aquiring a full copy of the game upon release is that you have at least 10 hours of Beta Testing logged. This is just to encourage active testing which we would really appreciate, and if you do not reach the target number of hours you will still have had a chance to playtest the game during Beta
8 ) There are a limited number of initial Beta slots, so its mainly "First Come, First Served"
How to join:Send an email to
[email protected] with the following details:
1) A short presentation of yourself any why you are interested in joining Beta Testing
2) Your email
3) Your PC Specifications
4) Your availability (rough estimate only) for Beta Testing
5) Any replies to the Checklist above
I will gather join request during the weekend and the upcoming week and as soon as I feel I have a good pick I will email back replies and, if selected, Beta Keys which can be used to access the game
And of course, any feedback from you guys directly related to the BorderStrain announcement and Steam Page is alwasy welcome, regardless if you are interested in participating as a Beta Tester or not! Please provide any questions, feedback or thought below!
Im hoping that we might have some discussion about the game and a bit about the design, please feel free to post any questions and I will try to reply as soon as possible!
In good forum manner I will start by telling about one of the many small technical design aspects I've implemented:Roads & RiversDesigning the game I wanted there to be roads and rivers leading between towns, special locations as well as between lakes. Being procedually generated I had a bit of a challange to find a good way to approach it, especially since the game is seed based and restarting with the same seed should yield the exact same rivers & roads!
What I ended up doing is dividing up the world into Regions. A Regions is a part of the game world typically hosting one larger town, a few lesser locations and a couple of lakes. The regions are always generated identical by basing the seed on the Regions world coordinates.
Now I had a way of always generating the same cities, special locations and lakes every time. The roads could now be implemented by each Chunk generated (a small world block array) listing any of the above locations upon being generated. I then used the Midpoint Displacement Algorithm to generate the path of Roads & Rivers, the seed used was based on the location of the start & endpoint. Finally I simply add in any road or river that passess the generated chunk! This means that two lakes will always generate the same meandered river between them.
This actually worked pretty well and Im pleased with the results!
Best Regards, BG109!
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