Recently, Palia began its first alpha test period, and now the team at Singularity 6 has a recap of the playtest, including insight gains, player experiences, and more takeaways from the testing process.
The impressions from the devblog certainly run on the encouraging side, as they note,
“In just a few short weeks, our players not only skyrocketed our game development forward with thoughtful feedback and crucial bug reports, they also captured the joy and magic of Palia in brand new ways.”
Among the highlights were players getting into really test features like the fishing system, foraging, bug catching, and hunting. In addition to these resource gathering and harvesting skill systems, players were also able to test an early build of cooking. Cooking will also need resource gathering, as it will use crops, and the blog also showed off some player gardens with carrots and tomatoes. Gardening is a system that they acknowledge still needs some real work, but having a lot of playtesters looks to already be making a difference from what they offered by way of practical interaction with the available content even in an alpha build.
Another of the major features in Palia is housing. And there’s no shortage of both player enjoyment and creativity noted here. With limited time and in a limited build, Palia testers were able to create cozy homes, some featuring gathering spaces, some creating bars, bedrooms, living spaces, and even ones that involved parkour.
But there was serious testing to be done too, and they were able to use the guidance of “Hype and Chaos” to get in there and test the build. One player decided to make as many pies as possible before the system broke down and made 1,023 pies before that happened. This was just one way players tried to break the systems, and helps the team learn what to fix and what to improve upon.
Being an MMO, Palia also had room for alpha testers to socialize, and the blog also features a number of player submitted photo ops of groups enjoying the world and its features.
You can read the alpha recap devblog over at Palia.
