We’ve had an eye on BitCraft, a procedural-gen MMORPG sandbox, since it first surfaced in 2019 as Clockwork Labs’ well-funded new toy. In spite of the “bit” in its name, it’s not a crypto game (the studio referred to such games as a “crypto blackhole“); it’s a Unity game that counted 752,000 signups for its pre-alpha, the ninth (yes) iteration of which came and went at the top of April.
“We learned a few lessons from this test,” Clockwork says in its blog recapping the event. “First, how adding a seemingly harmless step to the tutorial can drastically change the dynamic of a playtest, and second, how that seemingly harmless step could uncover a variety of bugs we would not have noticed otherwise! While this meant that this Pre Alpha wasn’t a smooth ride for the players, we did learn a lot, which is why we do these tests in the first place.”
Phase 10 (yes) of the pre-alpha is ideally the last pre-alpha milestone for the game, and it’s also the biggest, as it involves a swap to a new backend system, as well as a UI revamp and polish on existing test content.
“We are planning at least two Pre-Alpha tests in the coming months. One, which we are calling Pre-Alpha 10, is primarily focused on testing the additional tiered content and how well that engages players over a longer period of time. Pre-Alpha 10 is planned to be a week long. Pre-Alpha 10 is likely going to run on the legacy server-side system, which means we’ll need to do an additional test sometime after Pre-Alpha 10 to specifically test the stability and performance of the new server-side software.”
