Hello future agents!
As we approach the very first closed beta, I wanted to share a few thoughts including our future plans for the game.
But before I do–some players might know who we are, but I assume lots of you haven’t heard about Ocean Drive Studio. We are a young dev studio based in Korea and US, and we recently released our first game, Lost Eidolons, which is a turn-based tactical RPG and quite different from Blackout Protocol.
As a studio, we have a very strong vision and philosophy for creating fun and engaging games. And although Blackout Protocol is quite a different genre from Lost Eidolons, our vision of how to create the game is the same. The devs behind Blackout Protocol are very passionate gamers of the rogue-lite, twin-stick shooter genres much like how the devs behind Lost Eidolons were turn-based tactical RPG lovers! Also, as we did with Lost Eidolons, our number one priority is making the game with the community. We really value opinions from fans who love these genres like us, and we plan to share ongoing development and future plans periodically via dev blogs. We’ll also be providing thoughts on Discord, Steam Community, and Feature Upvote.
If you want to know more about the studio, please visit our website! Here are some blogs I would recommend:
- The Beginning (of the Studio)
- Thoughts on The Community-Driven Development Approach
- Why I Joined Ocean Drive Studio
What to Expect From The Beta
NOW! Let’s talk about Blackout Protocol and the upcoming beta!
We have worked on the game for over one and a half years, but we have mainly focused on shaping the core gameplay in that time so you will notice polish is not there.
But most of the core gameplay and systems have been implemented and balanced out for the beta! As this is our first public outing, you might experience technical issues or bugs we had not seen in our isolated internal tests. But if we do find critical issues during beta or get reports of them from you, we will try to fix such issues right away.
As the game is not finished, you would be able to test out a few progression features but the full content wouldn’t be there yet.
With this first beta, we have three objectives:
- Verify if the game is stable
- Verify if the core gameplay is fun
- Verify if the game is unique enough from competitors
But we want to hear all the thoughts and insights you might have, so please share your thoughts with us!
We are all thrilled to finally have you play the game! And we are even more excited (and nervous at the same time) to hear your feedback. We are very serious about taking feedback so please do not hesitate to share every little thought you have when playing the game.
If you haven’t, please join our Discord channel to talk about the game or find other players to play the game together! Also, you can always leave your thoughts on the Steam community, and Feature Upvote board we would be sharing before the closed beta! Lastly, please participate in our survey so that we can better shape the game for future Early Access!
What’s Next
After the beta, we plan to improve the game and participate in Steam Next Fest, and we hope to enter Early Access in near future.
Our goal here is to ready the game for Early Access, then make improvements with your feedback, start adding content, add polish, and finally release the official version.
We do have a rough timeline for when we’d like the official release to be, but we fully understand Early Access will give us insights that will steer us away from it. So rather than commit to a date of the official release, I will commit to transparent communication and actively making decisions with the community for the betterment of the game. Once beta ends, we will make sure to share what we learned from the beta and what would be the next step for the game!
We really appreciate all of you showing interest in the Blackout Protocol and look forward to working together to create something meaningful for the fans of the genre.
Thank you and speak again soon!
Head of Global Business,
Jungsoo Lee
