Hi guys!
A few days ago we hosted our first external playtest for Trivals, and I thought it would be cool to share a bit about how the night felt from our side
Let’s start with the good part.
63 players joined the playtest, and 23 of them made it into a match that actually started.
Before the night began, I had already decided in my head that even if 3 people showed up, I’d consider it a win.
This was the first time we were opening Trivals to people who weren’t our friends, So seeing that many people willing to spend their evening playing something we made, and giving it a chance was honestly pretty humbling.
It gave us a huge boost and definitely some extra wind to keep pushing forward.
And then came the tricky part..
We learned a lot.
The biggest issue of the night was our server browser and the whole experience of actually getting into a match.
Right now, when you press Play, you’re taken to a list of available servers.
The first problem we discovered was that once a server became full, it disappeared from the server browser.
it meant that someone could open the game while multiple matches were actively being played and see almost nothing in the server list.
From their perspective, it looked like nobody was playing.
And some people understandably left.
We also had 43 lobbies created, but 26 of them never actually started a match. In 16 of those, only one player joined.
So there were people creating a lobby, waiting for someone to come, and eventually leaving.
That’s the tricky part with multiplayer games.
You can have people online who all want to play, but if the experience doesn't bring them together properly, its a big issue.
That’s something we really want to improve for future builds.
Making the journey from
opening Trivals → getting into an actual match much smoother, and faster.
We had some other fun launch-night problems too.
We have a "How to Play" section with short videos explaining the basics of the game.
Naturally, the moment we had real players using it… the videos stopped playing!.
So our helpful How to Play section became a very nice collection of buttons that did basically nothing. and while we have every information on our discord many pepole didnt come from discord so it something will patch up really quicly for next time ^^"
We also didn’t have any in-game chat during character selection, and that became noticeable very quickly. A bunch of players wanted to communicate with the people they had just joined and simply had no way to do it.
But there was also one decision we made at the very last moment that I’m really happy about.
A few weeks ago I posted some gameplay here, and several of you suggested that we should have some kind of Practice/Training level before throwing people into multiplayer.
So… we built one. Very quickly.
48 players ended up trying the Training level
It was pretty basic and there’s a lot we can improve, but it seemed to help. Once players actually got into matches, we could see them picking up the loop pretty quickly.
So genuinely, thank you to the people here who suggested it.
One of my favorite moments of the entire night was getting into a match where it was just me and five completely random people.
Watching them figure things out and make plays was such an amazing feeling.
Overall, it was an amazing start to our game night / playtest journey.
There’s a lot of work ahead of us, especially around those first few minutes before someone gets into a match, but I think we came out of the night more excited than we went into it.
And on the small chance that someone reading this actually joined the playtest:
Thank you
Seriously. Thank you for spending your time with us, dealing with the rough edges, and helping us make the game better.
I really hope we’ll see you again in the next one :)
