Hello all you Electricians out there! What's shaking?

Please enjoy your new affectionate nickname.

Groove here, back at it again in the Steam news trenches to give you a pretty hefty Development Update Jumbo Deluxe.

I’ll be touching on what we have been doing, what's happening to the game based on your feedback and what brand-spanking-new content is coming as development continues into the year.

So let’s jump from the battle bus right into it, shall we?

• January Playtest Retrospective

As you may have seen, we held our first playtest as Heart Electric a few weeks ago.
Now that we're back to developing the next version of the game and digesting all your feedback, here's a little retrospective on the event.

To start with - It's no exaggeration to say that this was our biggest gathering of players so far.
We saw over 750 unique players in the game, with 143 peak concurrent players and over 60 matches run to completion.

We had quite a few livestreams covering the playtest from players and creators, like high-ranking Valorant player CaMbCaMb and FPS Vtuber group EVE.EXE!

Everyone had a blast learning how to navigate and what’s possible mechanically in the game. Twitch chats were on fire whenever someone got dunked, and sounded very intrigued about what we are making!

The most played hero was - to no one's surprise - Jazz, with Koji not far behind.
We received a lot of feedback on these two for how to balance power levels, so thank you for that.

All of which is to say, we’re super happy with the result and stability of the playtest!
Humble beginnings, as they say.
We're only just getting started but a good start doesn't hurt.

Moving on, I want to address the valid frustrations that arose around January 18th.

We’ve heard your feedback on playtest timing and communication, especially the challenges of balancing optimal play times between North American and EU regions, and we’re committed to improving with clearer playtest information and better solutions.
Your support and constructive feedback is invaluable to our game’s development, and we deeply appreciate you being part of this journey. Stay connected with us by following our socials, joining our Discord and signing up for emails to avoid missing future communications regarding playtests.

Now back to the exciting stuff!

• What are we changing/adding next?

Based on everyone's feedback and experience during the January playtest, allow me to talk about some of the changes that we are working on RIGHT👏THIS👏VERY👏SECOND!

• Gunplay:
  We are looking at more forgiving gunplay for players on the move, giving you better control while in motion and more opportunities to land those sweet drive-by and peek shots.
  
  We are also making changes to some guns (Sandman, Stingray, Ram) to bring them a bit closer to the others. So expect bullet speed and general effective ranges of weapons to change.
  
  
• Ultimate Abilities:
  We will do a pretty significant balancing pass on Hero ultimates, giving all characters the situations to shine that they deserve!
  
  
• Game HUD and UX:
  There's quite a lot of UI functionality and other objective information that we didn't get into the January playtest build.
  These will help players more clearly read the state of the match and make quick decisions.
  
  How we clearly communicate gameplay objective information will receive a lot of focus as we move forward, as it’s extremely core to our game mode.
  
  The Smart Ping used to mark enemies and see their status will be improved and be less finicky.
  The damage indicator will be made clearer, with some audio additions, to make it really obvious when you are TAKING or DEALING damage.
  
  The in-game compass at the top of the screen will be upgraded to display various information and objectives at a glance:
  
  
• Visuals and Performance:
  More placeholder environments are continuously being replaced with proper assets, and the arenas will just look nicer in general as development continues.
  
  We have started updating the character shading for every Hero. This does a bunch of technical stuff behind the scenes, but basically makes everyone look nicer in the game!
  
  Performance will also improve as we continue to optimize our assets, and we hope to see a steady improvement with every future playtest in terms of FPS.
  
  Our netcode is being improved (using dark programming witchcraft I don't understand), making the overall gameplay experience on normal and high ping better.
  
  
• Energy and Loot:
  We are also looking into changing Shield functionality, Energy economy, and how Loot works. Expect the flow of the game to feel much better when we’ve implemented all this!

You might not see all of these things present in the very next playtest, but all of this (and more!) is coming. We know what needs to get done, but it takes a lot of time.

We just want to be transparent and show you exactly what is being worked on, and that we take your feedback very seriously.

When we say that Heart Electric is all about community-driven development - we mean it.

There were of course topics of feedback from you all that are not mentioned in the above list.
We have digested these as well, and rest assured that more changes are in the works that will be introduced later in the year as development continues.

• Teasers of coming things

On that note, we have new stuff on the way that you can see and touch and it will have textures and AUUGHH CONTENT!!!

• A new center Pancake area, featuring some interesting-and-definitely-historically-accurate statues...

• Several heroes... (Silhouettes is all you're getting for now hoho~)

• More weapons...

• And we are giving characters new voice lines to bring them to life!⚡

That's about it for today!
Once again - we're super grateful to all of you for reading and supporting us in all your little ways.🩷

If you have any other questions about what we're working on, or just some cool feedback ideas then jump in our Discord and let us know!

I shall see you all on the flip side - peace out!

/Groove, Community

After much anticipation, it's finally time for you to jump into some Heart Electric action with thousands of other eager testers...

• Custom Loadouts are now available. Please make sure to select your Mods while making the loadout or else your loadout will not save. Custom Loadouts can currently not be re-named.
  
• There are now two Hearts, a normal Heart and a super Heart. A super Heart can be filled up to 20 Energy, while the normal Heart caps at 10 Energy.
  
• You can now drain other teams with Hearts once the Heart is empty. Plant them at another team’s base to take from their Energy reserve, then bring the Heart back to your own base to gain Energy!
  
• Assignments are objectives that show up on the top right side of your screen. Your team starts the match with one and you can find others in chests. Complete them to gain energy.
  
• New Hyper weapon: RAM - a powerful grenade launcher.
  
• New primary weapon: Kraken - a light machine gun with a large magazine.
  
• New primary weapon: Stingray - an assault rifle.
  
• New Character: Prodigy - Give others the urge to dance with her Ultimate, which stuns players and locks them in an excruciatingly stylish dance trance. Scan the area with her ‘F’ ability to ping enemies.
  
• "New" Character: Crow - Take to the skies and glide freely using his 'F' ability, and unleash an orb of AoE damage with his Ultimate.
  
• Astronaut's Moon base got a makeover!
  
• The map is smaller and more concise than the one during the summer playtest.
  
• Players can now be banned, beware!
  
• Essence drops when players are flatlined. Pick up Essence to get Ultimate charges.
  
• Regions can now be selected by clicking on the Wi-Fi looking icon on the lower right side of your Lobby screen. You can select your closest region there.
  
• North America is now recognized by the Synths - expect lower ping if you are from this region and experienced issues during previous tests.
  
• Text chat has been implemented - Talk to and scheme with other teams to give yourself an edge. If you are caught abusing chat with harassment or NSFW content, you will be banned.
  
• Magnet no longer throws objects and causes collision damage. (RIP bonk kills) Instead, hold objects for a few seconds and aim them at other magnetic objects and let go to magnetize them together.

• You are currently unable to re-join a match in progress if you should get disconnected or quit for any reason. (We want to make this work ASAP for future playtests)
  
• If you get a matchmaking status saying “please manually select a region” or "NoValidRegions", please select your region manually instead of it being set to Automatic. You can find the region selector in the lower right of your Lobby screen, and it looks like a Wi-Fi bar symbol. Click on the button to open the region select.
  
• If no regions are available, press Ctrl+R to refresh your menu screen.
  
• If you have party issues, Ctrl+R refreshes your menu screen, which will help in a lot of cases. If players do not show as in-game but on Steam, you should still be able to invite them.
  
• Changing graphic settings while in a match can cause textures to disappear. If you are playing on a less powerful machine, please change graphics settings from the main menu instead to avoid this. If you lose textures, they should return the next match!
  
• Some rare crashes with specific GPUs - if you crash, go to support.
  
• Sometimes (rarely) a Heart might get stuck - this is on our radar to fix ASAP as well!
  
• During long bursts (over 30 bullets) the Vesper weapon will start to fire very close to vertical.
  
• Loadout text can act weird with different localizations. If you see weird words in loadouts it will be due to this.
  
• Prodigy’s pistol is not silenced as intended.

🔥 If this is your first time playing and you are still confused about our game, peep our updated How to Play video for this playtest to learn how our new Game Mode works! 🔥

That's about it! We really hope you have a great time playtesting Heart Electric, and that you're able to share your honest thoughts with us in our Discord!
See you on the battlefield soon, and try not to kick our developer butts too hard <3

/Groove