Why Early Access?

“We're a small but passionate development team, our community is the most important part of Protoball. We've been alpha & beta testing the game for two years now and we're ready to expand into a larger audience and stress test our systems. To do this we need more players!

The game is nearly complete, but we still have some polishing and tweaking to do and we need your help! More players will help us test our infrastructure and game design. Early Access is kind of like a "Soft Opening" for us.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We estimate that we'll be in Early Access somewhere between 3 and 9 months, depending on what we learn from Early Access. Barring any unforeseen issues we don't think we'll take much longer than 6 months.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“The full version will be completely cross platform on Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. Users will be able to keep their full inventories from PC on any platform once released.

It will feature more game modes, better graphics (no more placeholders), extra cosmetic assets (outfits, VFX and more), more animations (physics driven for more realism and epic ragdolls!), competitive optimization, competitive and casual queues as well as a Party Queue!

We intend to have the following for full release;

• Complete Competitive Balance & Optimization
  
• Polished Graphics & Animations
  
• A large (and ever growing) inventory of custom outfits & VFX
  
• Team Integration - You might compare this to a guild or clan in other games. Teams will be able to customize their team uniforms (Home, Away and a 3rd Variant) and roster. (Update - Already Added!)
  
• Leaderboards, Leagues/Divisions, Tournaments(Update - Already Added!)
  
• Dodgeball Mode - Everyone loves dodgeball! (Update - Already Added!)
  
• Laser Tag Mode - A true test of FPS skill with hit-scan laser beams and athletic movement. (We may change this to "slow foam balls" instead of lasers...)
  
• More and more - Our community has already contributed so much, and we expect that, as it grows, we'll gain even more great ideas and insight

(Update - We've recently added Bowling and American Gladiator modes based off of community suggestions! We have another top-secret mode in development right now!)”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“The current version of Protoball is our Open Beta version and it is basically 80% of the final game, with most of this work being graphical in nature. We've been testing for over a year now and the code & networking is rock solid.

The current online build of Protoball has the following :

• 5 Game Modes (some of these rotate in and out depending on development cycles) :
  - Sport Mode (Always available)
  - Dodgeball Mode (Always available)
  - 2D Side Scroller (Depends on testing schedule)
  - Bowling (Depends on testing schedule)
  - Galactic Gladiators (Depends on testing schedule)
  - Endless Racer (yet to be revealed, but in development)
  
• Online Matchmaking
  
• Offline Practice Arenas
  
• Customizable Athletes & Outfits, Skins, VFX, and more being added
  
• Players have a wide range of athletic abilities that cross-over into each game mode, making cross-training possible and fun.

The current state is a nearly complete, stable, fun, playable game!”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“We intend to double the price of options upon full release.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“Without the community you wouldn't be reading this right now. We value the community's contributions and feedback to the greatest degree. We listen to and carefully consider every suggestion that comes our way. You can ask the players in the discord how we respond, and we're confident their feedback will be nothing but positive. Many of our players can tell you that one of their ideas has actually made it into the game already.

In addition to all of the great ideas we need a larger community to help us stress-test our systems. We're confident we can handle any scale of growth because we've partnered with AWS GameLift. However, we still need to test!

We also need more stats to help us train our Competitive Ranking AI Machine. We're leveraging deep learning and AI to help analyze player stats in ways that no game has done before. By using AI we will come up with an entirely new and unique ranking methodology, one that doesn't only count how many points you've scored and how many games you've won, but considers nearly every action/stat that is recorded.

We hope our AI can help innovate the eSports scene. Giving support players and defenders their fair credit in the competitive eSports scene. To do this we need a much larger data set, which means we need a much larger player base! The time has come where we really need you now more than ever!

We're making the game that we all want to play. In short- the community IS our development process.”