FoF: closed beta announced and level designers wanted!

[R_Yell]

Fistful of Frags has reached a new milestone: our final testing stage is about to begin! We want to polish our gameplay and test in real world situations so your help will be very appreciated. If you are interested to be a tester, please check our boards for additional info.

This status of completion is also appropriate to start making more levels, so designers can get the idea of how FoF exactly will play when released. Join our closed beta if you want to map for FoF. Any level designer applicant must have completed and released multiplayer levels. Contact details and specifications here

Fistful of Dollars is the name of our main game mode, a completely new experience, not a clone like many others (with all my respects to those people that clone their favourite games). Check our info page for additional details.

Finally, some of our recent media, 12 weapons implemented and ready for action:

 

[Gordon-Shepherd]

awesome.

 

[Dekstar]

why a closed beta? Surely allowing everyone to play it will get you the most feedback? Really by making people ask you to play it, you're kinda limiting yourselves.
The mod does look good however.

 

[R_Yell]

People in closed beta are more participative towards finding bugs and polish the game. I don't expect exact that from a public beta where most people just join to play. They may report bugs or just remove the mod. So I prefer to catch most bugs now, and there is still some work to do in certain parts before any public release.

 

[R_Yell]

If you missed the chance to play our closed beta, there are new positions available again. These are our requirements, please read them carefully:

- dedication is a must, you need enough free time
- communication: you'll have to write about your impressions and those things you don't like or want improved
- location: server is in Europe take that in mind, don't expect a great ping if you play from America (around 150ms)
- hope you like western games, this is one of them after all... If you never tried one this is a good time to start.

Computer requirements:

- A machine capable of playing CS:S should work. For older hardware, well, we don't really know how much stressful can be our game for sure, so no problem if you want to try.

Way to sign in: register in our forum and join our group in steam community. Then send a PM there to RYell (me), indicating who are you in the fof group in case nick isn't the same.

 

[Shinobi]

why a closed beta? Surely allowing everyone to play it will get you the most feedback? Really by making people ask you to play it, you're kinda limiting yourselves.
The mod does look good however.

one thing is with an open beta, people assume that's a release and don't go back later..


kind of like with empires and dystopia

we've been closed testing for 6 months now and I still somewhat dread the day we do an open beta

 

[FriedchikenCamo]

one thing is with an open beta, people assume that's a release and don't go back later..

kind of like with empires and dystopia

we've been closed testing for 6 months now and I still somewhat dread the day we do an open beta

Some people are also extremely spoiled, demanding that the first public release should be a complete mod rather than a gameplay prototype.

From a board discussing an alpha gameplay teaser:

Any mod/team that defends obvious defects with the 'beta/alfa'-tag should be shot on sight, because if the team doesn't even believe it is worth playing then they shouldn't have released it either.

You can imagine someone releasing a mod to get feedback and reading something as callous as this then deciding they really should have done closed testing instead.

 

[Shinobi]

yeah, it's too bad but that's the thing about public betas, they're meant for catching the bugs you couldnt see with a small team of people who have invariably become comfortable with the game and it's quirks, you need new faces to break the game in countless ways and even contribute dare-I-say input

no matter how many times you try to crash a server with 32 people in private it always seems to happen once it goes public..

 

[FriedchikenCamo]

While I know that many bugs or seemlingly obvious mistakes tend to be overlooked in small test groups, the guy I quoted didn't seem to understand that.

Anyways, Fistful of Frags is looking interesting. I'm a fan of Westerns, so I'll check the mod out when it's released publically.

 

[Krenzo]

Yup, people just don't think alpha/beta means anything anymore. With Empires, we've held off releasing any public versions for the past year and just accepted all forum users who stuck around after the 1.0 release as private testers. It'll be interesting to see if this pays off when we release the next version soon.

 

[Shinobi]

Yup, people just don't think alpha/beta means anything anymore. With Empires, we've held off releasing any public versions for the past year and just accepted all forum users who stuck around after the 1.0 release as private testers. It'll be interesting to see if this pays off when we release the next version soon.

looking forward to it