Greetings from the closed Alpha

It’s been almost two months since we sent out the Alpha keys, so we thought it’s time to share some news about what’s happened since. First, thank you for every minute spent playing the test version! The testing corps has kept us busy with issue reports and requests, and with their help we’ve been able to push out six patches full of fixes and additions.

The test keys continue to work and the game will continue to be in development, now and even after we release it into Early Access, but we’ve already been able to make some big improvements. It would be a little boring to just list every discovery, though, so we decided to pick some highlights instead to show what we’ve learned and enjoyed most. (And as the changelog in full can be found on our GitHub anyway.)

Barotrauma Alpha test in a nutshell

Issue reports and feature requests so far: 350 (GitHub) + 77 (contact form)

Issues resolved so far: 170

The buggiest part of the game has been the multiplayer campaign, and networking related bugs in general have been common. Getting the networking features working smoothly in a procedural, physics-driven game with a million moving parts hasn’t been easy, and we’re still not quite at the finish line. But thanks to all of the help from the testers, we’re getting close!

The Most Prolific Report Writer prize goes to…NilanthAnimosus!

AbominationBanisher & rico6822 also get a special mention for GitHub activity, and another special thank you to everyone who has coordinated and participated in multiplayer testing events – here’s a brief video by one of our Alpha testers of one such community playtest session (disclaimer: explicit language):

From the black box

At the time of writing, Alpha testers have played 769 hours in total. The most popular sub was the Typhon II, followed by the Humpback and the Orca.

Barotrauma Extended never goes out of fashion and already had around ⅔ of the sessions that the Vanilla content package had. Besides BTE, there is already a bunch of custom subs and other cool things in Baro’s Steam Workshop courtesy of our Alpha testers.

Most deaths occurred on March 18, and on the same day there were also the most traitors on board.

In total, we have registered 13,250 deaths (including monsters); the total count of human deaths is 3508 (of which 2222 were AI characters, 1286 players). Following are the most common causes of death (in humans):

1. Barotrauma (519)

2. Internal damage (209)

3. Suffocation (155)

4. Burns (83)

5. Bloodloss (82)

6. Bitewound (40) (not in vanilla game, BTE addition?)

7. Radiation sickness (15)

Curiosities: one husk died of liver failure, a crawler died of hypothermia, an AI crewmember died of tryposlugs(???).

Just reading some of the GitHub reports has been extremely entertaining for us, even when they concerned serious issues in the game. Some of our favorites include the thicc hat, the very unfortunate Watchman and the unexpected lethality of having AI man the guns. These are among the many things we’ve fixed, along with fentanyl – a common medical item – inadvertently being one of the most lethal chemicals in the game due to a bug that caused the patient to suffocate almost immediately after injection…

In addition to bug reports, we’ve also got tons of development suggestions, like taking off the players’ undergarments (which we haven’t done yet, but who knows), and concerning gravity on Europa (which we were kind of hoping no one would ever notice). Luckily, some players have already come up with an entirely plausible explanation for the latter: the mass of all the sunken submarines has increased Europa’s mass so that the gravitational acceleration is about the same as on Earth. We also have some ideas of our own on how to give it an explanation that ties in with the story and the goal of the campaign, when we get that far 🙂

That’s all this time – next time you hear from us, we hope to be able to announce our release date!