Barren Planet: First Week Beta Testing Progress

Sunday, 9th April 2023

Thanks to the efforts of the beta test team, more progress has been made on making Barren Planet fit for release. Some bugs were identified, and some oversights.

The AI managed to build a unit some distance from its Mining Base. This isn't supposed to happen, and uncovered two bugs. The first, that the wargame engine was letting the AI (and the player) break the rules. The second, that the AI was trying to break the rules. Both of these bugs have hopefully been squashed.

Some players had difficulty telling the units of one side from the other. Not surprising, since Nuvutech units are white with cyan shading, and Avuscorp units are cyan with white highlights. There isn't much colour choice with CGA graphics! The white units have been made whiter, and the cyan units, well, cyan-er. Hopefully that should help.

The game has proved a bit too easy, even for first-time players. So I've added higher difficulty levels. Since the AI is designed to take its turn in a reasonable amount of time on an 8088 processor, it is necessarily limited. Therefore in true 1980s fashion a handicap has been introduced to balance the difficulty. In the higher levels, the computer's gunnery is a bit, or a lot, more accurate than yours and the computer's shots do more damage than yours.

Some more testing will take place over the coming weeks, to test these changes and to check for more issues. A release is still expected in the second half of April.