Letter from the Producer
November 2024
Greetings,
BitCraft will be back with Closed Alpha 3 starting Nov 12, 2024.
…and it will be exciting — because it will be a little dangerous again.
We always wanted Bitcraft to be a true survival game with all the main features connoisseurs of this genre enjoy while offering player types who prefer a more cozy and social game play room, and fun without being afraid of their lives all the time.
Some of our early testers will remember tests with hostile creatures sneaking around their camps at night. This led to some memorable episodes of players hiding behind walls of camp fires but it was not exactly the early gameplay experience we want for a new player.
So we took the adversaries temporarily out, to focus on the character progress, town building gameplay and empires during the following tests. We are proud of the improvements we made to the experience for new players over the last months and now is the time to get back to the roots:
There are creatures out there that want to eat you and you need to eat too.
Our SpacetimeDB team also made enormous progress further developing the serverside database architecture that powers BitCraft with a full release projected to be ready soon.
As a side note, other studios are already developing gaming and non gaming applications utilizing 0.x versions of SpactimeDB and we can’t wait to see what all these creative developers will come up with. Check out DeliveryZ by our friends from Lightfox Games if you want to see an example of a completely different game running on SpacetimeDB.
They built the whole thing in 3 months!
Ok, back to BitCraft Closed Alpha 3. In addition to the changes to the adversity, we’ve also redesigned the way settlements and characters interact. During earlier tests we found the vast majority of players were either starting their own claim or joining one of a trusted friend, this led to most of the player population playing separated in their siloed settlements. The intent for BitCraft was always to have much fewer settlements than players so that settlements would actually be social and trading hubs full of many people, but the game as it previously was, was encouraging the opposite.
Now all towns are more public, allowing any player to walk into any town and use it as if it was an NPC town in a traditional MMO, all without any downside to the settlement owner. This also raised the question of how to deal with the early game when players need settlement structures to progress. Now, players can find ruined towns where friendly travelers provide the basic amenities to get started. You can still go build your settlement when you are ready, but as you begin the game, you will be thrown into an area where you can socialize and trade with other new players and focus on your character progression without the burden of learning the claim system.
Player made settlements are still a key part of progression and you will need to visit more advanced player settlements to progress deeper in the game. These settlements are also incentivized to make a useful settlement by receiving free currency as other players use their settlement, creating the symbiotic relationship between the character scale and settlement scale we have always envisioned.
One often requested was a revamp of the movement controls. While we didn’t have time to dive deeply into this we were able to better expose keybinds to allow players much more customization around how to control their character including two new presets which give controls schemes you might find familiar from other games.
There are many more updates, new game art and improvements to be explored and we look forward to welcoming many of you to Closed Alpha 3. We are confident you will enjoy your stay.
Keep the feedback coming and see you ingame!
Alessandro
