Fantastic Pixel Castle is Ahead in Work on Ghost, Talking Playtests, Hardware, and Player Creativity
Fantastic Pixel Castle has had a few successful small playtests for their MMO, ‘Ghost’, according to their latest Word on the Street podcast episode. Not only are they testing the very early builds, development is even a bit faster than expected, in part thanks to how things are structured at the studio.
On development, things are progressing faster, in part, Greg Street and Scott Johnson discuss, to a lack of oversight. Though that doesn't mean they are being sloppy. They simply have more independence to work as a team without the layers and long chains of command. Street talks his time at Blizzard and notes that they'd finish something and not necessarily have the next thing set in place in part due to how many people had to weigh in.
As for the playtests, they’ve now run three in a row with external testers, with some of them having seen several hours of the game up in the early test build. Even with this, they're still variation since they generate the blue zones each time. Street says they’ve had concurrency up from about 80 to 100 players. The testers were being creative, interacting with the mechanics and doing things like building a bridge over a goo hazard, and fighting from the bridge, showing what the potential might be for the sandbox elements.
The team wants to make itfeel rewarding to explore and for solving puzzles and coming up with creative ways to do things. Yet, they also want to make things feel less separated and more interconnected. Avoiding just teleporting between individual pieces and instead, to have a sense of a unified world. This also works with their initial plans to launch with about 3 to 5 different biomes instead of more than a dozen that they initially considered. They compare it to 'island hopping in the Caribbean', in a sense. You can see different shards and figure out how to reach them, with less fast travel and teleportation and more things like skyboats to get you where you're going.
With these tests, they also started to
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