This month’s update is a look at the Alpha – how far we’ve come, where we are at, and what is in store next for the 1000+ alpha players helping us shape Cyber Knights: Flashpoint into a release-ready game.

Summer Checkpoint

The CK:F alpha started in early January of this year. Since then, we have gone through multiple major cycles of expansion – new levels, new systems, new stories, hacking (!!), new classes – followed by periods of rebalance and consolidation. The alpha backers have played thousands of games, submitted thousands of feedback and bug reports and pushed hundreds of thousands of events about levels, talents, and more into our analytics.

At this mid-summer moment in the alpha, we’ve been in another rebalance and consolidation phase. It’s been a good time for it; while the game is still getting a lot of play daily, we are seeing a clear summer vacation dip 😄 – hope you’re all enjoying them!

We’re currently preparing a major new content push of story, recruits and the Sniper class for our next expansion phase. With each passing month, the alpha’s scope is increasing to reach the game’s full scope; our pace of adding content will be rising.

We are also continuing the push to bring all the major audio-visual elements of the game up to the quality level we know we need to hit for Steam Early Access. Our UX designer continues to iterate on and improve the UI design and the SFX team is prepping for a second project in August to add more variety and depth to the game's soundscape. At the same time we're working through the game's post processing, material design, color-grading and quality settings to get everything looking as awesome as possible.

Transitioning the Alpha from AppCenter to Steam

We did our first online public demo of Cyber Knights: Flashpoint this month for PAX Rising Online, focused purely on the stealth & combat tactical gameplay over a two-stage mission, expanded from our in-person PAX East demo. Not only did we get the game in front of thousands more players, with all the valuable feedback that comes with that, but it also accomplished an important dev milestone: completing our process for building and deploying to Steam.

This is very good news for the alpha backers, because we’ll soon be using Steam’s awesome “Playtest” feature (in private mode, not public signups) to provide you with alpha access going forward. That means shorter (and more reliable) downloads, quicker builds and faster bugfixes.

Creator & Backstory Rewards

We’re excited to have embarked on the first major step to completing the Creator and Backstory Edition rewards. The surveys to gather data from these key creative tier rewards have gone out and include a wide variety of questions big and small. Cory and I will personally review each of the incoming responses and work on translating your creative ideas directly into the world of Cyber Knights and New Boston.

If you haven’t received a survey email but should have, please reach out to us here or email andrew@tresebrothers.com

Reward and Stretch Goal Progress

For completeness, we include the progress bar infographic in each and every update. If you have any questions about rewards or stretch goals, check out the graphic or reach out to us. We sent out the surveys for the two recruitment reward tiers – Creator and Backstory Editions – so keep an eye on your email for those and let us know if you have any questions!