Welcome to the latest of our reports from the front lines. This week we have great news for XBLA fans and we share our experiences with the beta so far.

JOIN THE BETA

Unstoppable Gorg is currently in closed beta. If you would like to join, find out how to sign up here. Don't worry if you don't get invited in straight away. We are running the beta in waves and there will be plenty of chances to secure a place.

MICROSOFT APPROVED FOR XBOX LIVE ARCADE

There was much celebration in the studio this week as we hit an important milestone for the Xbox LIVE Arcade version of Unstoppable Gorg. If you did not already know, it is probably not a surprise to learn that Microsoft has the ultimate say in whether you can release your game on their platform. To get permission, you have to first submit a proposal for Microsoft to review.

Just yesterday we heard that Microsoft has approved our Unstoppable Gorg proposal for worldwide release on Xbox LIVE Arcade. Yeah! A good thing too, as we had gone ahead and announced that there would be an XBLA version way back in July!

Of course, this is just the first step on a long road. We still have to finish making and testing the game, which brings us neatly on to the beta.

THE BETA BEGINS

One of the scariest moments in game development is when you let people who are not intimately familiar with every nuance of your design see your work in progress, and then nervously ask, "So, what do you think?"

So it was with sweaty palms and clenched teeth last week that we asked Steam to push the big red button* and start the beta.

The game is currently some way off being feature complete. There are a lot of missing elements and a lot of placeholder content. Most important of all to tower defense style games, the delicate balance between the game's various satellites and enemies that makes the game rewarding and fun still needs a ton of finessing.

Here is where we take our hats off to our great team of beta testers. We have been delighted with the quality of the feedback, ideas and suggestions coming our way. Players have discovered new bugs that we had not seen, and suggested some inspiring ideas we may not have thought of ourselves. It has been a very promising start to the beta, and a huge boost for the team, especially when we read comments like these:

First of all, grats to FM for developing another great game! It's obvious that there's still work to be done but the concept works great.
It's an easy to learn concept that allows for comparably complex strategies and gameplay ... so the perfect ingredients for a highly addictive game. :)
This game is going to be killer. I've only been testing it for one day and I'm already sold. Great work to your team!
Good luck finishing up the game, it's already quite awesome, i really like the style and setting.
A few people have asked whether we can open the beta up to people playing on Xbox or iPad. This is something we would love to do but unfortunately it is not very practical for the type of beta we are running. One of the (many) great things about Steam is that we can update the game whenever we want. The processes involved with Xbox LIVE and the App Store would just slow us down.

We are aiming to update the beta through Steam once a week. But even this was not enough for our programmers who put together a rather awesome system that lets us change unit properties such as health, rate of fire or range remotely without needing a Steam update. We are collecting a huge volume of game stats from every session played. We can analyse these stats daily to see where the balance needs to be tuned, and then push new unit settings to the game automatically.

Though there is only a small team working on the game - 2 programmers, an artist, game designer, and producer - the change logs are growing quickly each day as new features, content and bug fixes make it into the game.

Code and art is not the only area where we are making fast progress, however. The game also has a few story scenes that we are creating in an authentic vintage sci-fi style. I am saving the details for a future update, but for a hint of what is to come, check this out ...




Your questions and comments are always welcome. Post away!


PREPARING FOR INVASION

Report 1: Gamescom, first screenshots
Report 2: Concept art, designing like it's 1954
Report 3: Back story, development tools
Report 4: Getting ready for the beta

* They will deny it of course, but there really is a big red button at Steam they press to release games and updates.