Our playtest has been approved by Steam, and we're ready to start welcoming more players in for their first sneak peek at Terrestrial (Chronet RP v2), after over a year of active development.
How to get in
Head over to chronet.com/playtest, sign in with Steam and you'll get a key. Redeem it in Steam and Terrestrial Playtest appears in your library. Friends can join you from Steam (right-click your name and choose Join Game, or use Invite to Play), but they need their own key first.
How the playtests will run
We'll run small playtest sessions over the coming weeks. For now they'll most likely be rather spontaneous, so keep an eye on Discord for when the next one starts: join the Discord.
Each session lets us gather bugs and feature requests, fix things, and release the next playtest version to try, without worrying too much about breaking the game or the servers in between.
Please be aware this is an early edition of the game. Things are buggy and often broken, but it's also very much playable, so enjoy it! If you hit something, or have an idea, press F3 in game to report a bug or send a feature request. It takes a screenshot and sends it straight to us.
The long way round
Getting here took a while. I've been back making games for about three years, and for most of that I was trying to work out what game to make, where my passion for game development really lies, and how to make any of it possible. I tried Unity, then Unreal, then Unity again, then Godot, and in the end decided to create an engine from scratch. It's been a long journey, so I'm very excited to be releasing this playtest. It's a big first step towards getting the game out there, and I really hope everybody enjoys it.
After almost ten years since Chronet, I'm honoured to welcome you to this new chapter. I'm always in awe of how many of you messaged me over the years to say how much fun you had in Chronet, and I want to bring a little of that back through Terrestrial: a place that's all about bringing people together to enjoy themselves. There will be a lot of chaos in between, obviously, but ideally we just want to have fun, right? That's why we play games.
What's next
The plan is to go into Early Access sooner rather than later. That might be as soon as a few weeks, or it could be a few months. The playtest is there to iron out enough bugs and get enough features in that the Early Access game already feels playable and players can start having fun straight away, and then to get more people into the world.
Playtests will keep running spontaneously until we find a rhythm. I should be honest that this isn't my full-time thing: I have other work and other businesses I run. I hope to spend more and more time on it, especially if some game sales come in, which would help a lot.
I love game design and development, and I'm really excited to have the community involved in creating the Chronet v2 we've always wanted to make.
Cheers, and see you in the city.