Welcome future Governors!
We're thrilled today to open the very first Kaiserpunk Playtest! New game version will be available from today until Monday, July 22nd, and main goal is to gather new feedback from all sorts of players. Playtest game version is not the same as previously available demo, but it still a quite incomplete game version, so please keep that in mind - there will be bugs and errors as well as missing content. To get the option to participate in this free Playtest, you'll need to first "Request access" on game store page. We're gathering interested people for a few days already, but will likely continue to grant access after Playtest already starts, at least during first day. So don't worry, if you're hearing this now for the first time, you're still not late! Allow us a moment to explain the purpose of this Playtest: During initial demo availability we've encountered some hardware problems (too high drain on video memory and low frame on some machines). That prevented a number of players to try out the demo as they intended. We'd like to apologize once again for that, but we did take all reports very seriously. A few weeks have been dedicated fully to first optimization rounds primarily. During internal tests in recent days we've measured significant performance improvements, as well as drop off in video memory requirements. That means game should load up normally to many additional players that experienced memory peak and freeze moments before, and should overall work smoother.
During this work, a few more areas were found where more sizeable performance gains can be reached, so we'll absolutely pursue it too. But at the moment, we'd like to double check what were the results so far before we continue.
On the content side, Playtest version introduces second (out of several more) geographical biome - ARID and couple of new maps. In final game, these various biomes will cover different parts of the world, depending on what region you select to start your game in. In total you'll be able to play through several maps and two different biomes, but at the moment tutorial features are enabled only on map designated as "tutorial". This means that maps other the tutorial one will currently function as full sandbox. All currently available game features will work, as well as salvageable scenery, but you should already be familiar with how game mechanics work (basic hints will still be there). You can always try out tutorial map first, then switch to some of the other ones. Eventually, plan is to have tutorial linked to any available ingame map (but will have an option tu be turned off).
Playtest version has the same time limit set at 4 hours in a single session while number of different sessions isn't restricted.
