Good morning, commanders! I hope your weekend is off to a good start.

As I've been teasing you around the last week and then some, the Public Playtest part of Para Bellum - Hold the Line's development has concluded as of Thursday midnight. The lucky winner of the Steam Gift Card giveaway has been picked and contacted personally. Once more, a huge thanks to everyone who participated and left their feedback! I very much appreciate it and it's just gonna help making the final game the best it can be.

Before going into much more detail about the playtest results, I want to share a couple of things.

As you might already know, Para Bellum - Hold the Line will be coming on Steam. The actual launch date is not yet settled, but I'm looking forward to launching the game either later this year or early 2022. If you want to stay tuned for news towards the launch, I suggest that you add the game to your Steam Wishlist so that you will be notified when it's up! Big thanks to everyone, who's already done so :)

Another way to follow the game's development is to follow me on Twitter.

On to the playtest results then, shall we?

One of the most reassuring data points for me is that 100% of the players claim that they enjoyed playing the game. That's a great thing looking forward of course, but doesn't really give me much to work with. The rest of the results will help with that.

Players perceived the game's difficulty either good as it is - or a bit too difficult. This is something I've been looking forward to fixing by balancing and adding some more features that will give player more agency over their Units actions.

A session length was considered either good as it is or a bit too long. I very much agree with that observation. I hope I can fix this by balancing the campaign mode in a way where it feels balanced with some shorter, but more intense, but also some longer missions.

The game's looks were not appreciated by the playtesters too much. Most of the players feel like the game looks pretty much ok as it is, but there are a significant number of players who are not pleased with how it looks. I have and will be taking steps in the future in order to improve this. My first action has been reskinning the user interfaces, which weren't very pretty to look at as they are. Here's what I've got after yesterday's work - let me know what you think!

Most of the players felt like their actions had a big impact on their success. That's a great thing, but there were also players who were longing for more player agency. That is something I'm currently fixing on multiple layers. The campaign mode will have customization options that will have impact on how you perform in the missions. I also added a priority targeting feature for the player to designate specific targets for their Units to engage. I'm looking into some other improvements in this aspect as well, but I'm not yet 100% set on the plans.

One thing I'm extremely happy with is that no players reported performance issues or game breaking bugs. I have yet to test the game on lighter/older hardware, but at least on any mid-range decent hardware the game should be running fine. If anyone wants to help me with that, I would be happy to share the playtest build with someone who has a computer with some older or lower end hardware for testing.

The playtesters' favourite unit was the Sniper, which comes as a little surprise to me since the last favourite was the Machinegunner. There was also a player or two who actually preferred the Reservist which is quite fascinating. I would like to hear more of their strategies!

The overwhelming least favourite unit was Grenadier. Sniper and Reservist were also mentioned, interestingly contrasting the previous point.

Another surprising contrast to the previous point is that the mostly feared enemy Unit for the playtesters was the Grenadier.  Maybe it is not too surprising that grenades are not as useful as a defensive weapon as they are in the offensive.

Grenadiers will be seeing some fixes and tweaks in the future regardless.

Most of the players didn't have a favourite or least favourite map and the rest of the answers for that are so scattered that it's not really worth going into detail. I admit that the playtest build had maybe even a bit too much of abundance in options leading into a situation where the players wouldn't have the time to test all the available maps. I do however feel like adding those maps in the first place was a good idea, since I now have way better understanding over level design and what makes a map fun and engaging to play. This will hopefully be noticed by the players when playing the final game!

As far as supports go, Mortar Strikes and Sandbags were almost equally appreciated by the players. The rest went a bit on the sidelines. That's understandable - not all supports are created equal. I hope to add some more  variety to the supports before the final launch.

Enemy vehicles were considered a significant threat. Maybe even to an extent where they're sometimes a bit too much to deal with.

As far as player requests and suggestions go, players have been asking Medics - which were already implemented to the game during the playtest period, thanks to that valuable feedback! - static weapon emplacements, friendly vehicles, airstrikes and paradrops of Units just to name a few common ones. I hope to get to accommodate these wishes to the best of my abilities and in the scope of the game and its launch schedule.

Overall the playtest was a very positive experience and gave me a lot of confidence and valuable feedback to move forwards with! I hope to get the game in to your hands as soon as possible, but without compromising its quality.

Thanks a lot for reading through this quite long post. I hope you found it interesting :)

Have a great weekend!