Anyway – the Seal Hunter beta is progressing quite nicely at this point -  so far there’s been a total of 12 major beta revisions released. A whole load of bugs has been ironed out, many features have been polished, and quite a bit of balance/stability testing has been done. Currently, what I’m trying to focus on is the balancing of three player games – it’s way harder than what is reasonable (I wouldn’t be surprised if the difficulty of this will force me to limit the game to a total of three participating players – technical issues contribute, too). To make matters worse, I’m in the process of adding a few new weapons, as well.

One of these new weapons would be the Carl Gustav – a high-tier recoilless rifle that packs a lot of raw power while lacking in splash damage. To make envisioning this weapon a bit easier, for $9500 you get a weapon that currently deals approximately 700 damage at its epicenter. It currently has somewhat of a support role, much akin to the AWP, but trading bullet penetration for area affect. It’s still very much beta material, so expect some tweaking to be done on it before the final release. (And maybe even get rid of my programmer art for it.)

Something that I had planned out for quite a long while and then suddenly ended up implementing on a whim was the addition of achievements. There’s 60 of them in the game as of this moment, and they’re all pretty ‘hardcore’ in the sense that many are kinda hard to actually earn. I’ll most likely end up extending the number of achievements even further before the final 1.0 release.

And to abuse the segway – the final release, while not exactly close, shouldn’t be crazy far away any longer. Keep in mind that I’m the only person doing the actual production and coding for Seal Hunter, and with school effectively keeping me busy from 7 to 7, working on SH isn’t my top priority. I am working on it; my time is just severely more limited nowadays.

Again, sorry for not keeping you updated as frequently as I’d like to. If you have any suggestions for future posts, please do tell – I’ll happily accommodate you!

Should you not have been accepted this time either, please accept my humblest apologies. I can’t accept all testers, since they’re almost all too many already!

And beta wise, things are progressing nicely, but y’know, that school thing. Busy. Yeah. I’ll see if I can give you non-beta people some goodies soon, though.

Happy hunting ’til next time!

Anyway, in the next few days (read: in the next week or so) I will most likely bring in a second batch of beta testers – so keep your eyes and ears peeled for an e-mail (alternatively, just visit the forums and see if a brand new section is available to you). A post will appear here, as well, once the second batch has been invited.

Gmail users might want to check their spam folder, too – sorry for the inconvenience in that.

The beta phase has now started, with a little over 40 testers being appointed for the time being. “Bugs coming at us like in Starship Troopers”, to quote a certain song.

With this in mind, I’d like to apologize to those people not brought in for the beta – I know it must be a real downer for you guys. I simply could not have taken all of you, though, as much as I had wanted to. I might still take in a few extra testers in a second batch, though, so all hope is not lost just yet!

If it’s of any consolation, though, here’s the Seal Hunter intro movie – even though that’ll probably act as even more of a teaser. (Watch it on YouTube for higher resolutiony goodness!)

Until next time.