We hold playtests with gamers, some of whom are seasoned AAA developers, to find out what areas of Field of Heroes are buggy, can be improved, or are otherwise pulling players out of the immersion of fun gameplay.

Changes Since the Last Playtest

The major changes since the last playtest are in summary:

• Upgraded the game engine from Unreal Engine 5.6 to 5.7
• Balance improvements to hero damage and skills
• It’s easier to knock the ball away from an opponent
• Rendering performance improvements
• Improved goal scoring and post-match ceremonies
• Added a new field

Setup

Twitch Stream

Playtests are performed live on Twitch for tester coordination, for playing back clips to help resolve hard-to-duplicate bugs, and to promote the game.

Discord

All testers join a single Discord voice channel for real-time coordination and feedback. Player log files are typically uploaded to a Discord playtest channel; but for this playtest they were not needed.

Notepad++

This app is used for note taking purposes. Notes are saved in a folder corresponding to the playtest.

Testing Focus

Before a test begins, the host will tell all testers what to look out for during the playtest. In this playtest, the focus was on soccer ball possession and kicking.

Testing Format

In this playtest we deviated from the standard format of covering general feedback about everything; and instead stuck to a basic Q&A script and shortened the total test time from 1 hour to 30 minutes.

1. Waited for testers to arrive on Discord voice chat.
2. Played for 20 minutes.
3. Gathered targeted feedback for 10 minutes.
   • We went through a list of questions, having each playtester respond one at a time. I then recorded the answers and wrote them into my text file.
   • Following the list, each of us rated the game as a number between 1 and 10 where 1 was “completely awful” and 10 was “I can’t wait to play again.”
   • Lastly, a few minutes of final thoughts.

Playtest Results

Soccer Ball Control

Regarding ball control and kicking: The game tested well. Players had more opportunities to loose the ball from opponents using their abilities, felt in control while they had the ball, and the ball almost always went in the direction they intended to kick it to. There was however still a minor issue where sometimes the ball would be intercepted by another hero standing near the kicker when it should not have.

Ratings

Overall satisfaction averaged 6.8 out of 10. This is better than the previous playtest; but what pulled the rating down were the lack of human players and network jitter.

What Happens Next?

Our current goal can be summarized in four words: Get. The. Demo. Out.

We think Field of Heroes is, at long last, almost ready to be promoted from Playtest to Demo. There’s little more we can do without getting feedback from dozens, maybe hundreds of players. In hindsight, we should have had a demo out at least two years ago with more limited content to see if there was value in building it out further.

Before we can release a demo with limited field content, this work must be done:

• Critical bug fixes
• Optimization passes on CPU, GPU and networking
• Finish UI reskins (notably the Settings menu, the Social UI and the Career UI)
• Finish the Practice field
• Basic player stats tracking (lifetime goals/takedowns/damage and accolades)
• Social QOL features (passworded custom servers, flagging players for offensive in-game chat)
• Finish VFX polish
• Improved Gamepad controls and haptics
• Create a Demo trailer

The goal is to finish the demo in this Spring 2026. If all goes well, an Early Access release will follow in Summer 2026.