It finally feels like a game

Playtest 6 is the whole test scenario, start to finish, in one go. One section out on patrol, a contact, a casualty, and a helicopter at the end of it. The quiet bits are fast-forwarded hard, so it comes in at about seventeen minutes.

First thing you'll see is a menu. And a mission brief. It's clearly work in progress, but it just makes it feel like a real game now.

01 Voices on the net

The biggest piece of work since playtest 5 is the radio. You can now hear human voices on the net. Most of them are my voice, converted into different people, and I'm not a voice actor, so treat them as placeholders. We've got veterans in the community who've offered to give their time and put their own voices in, and they'll sound better than I do. But either way, I'm pretty damn happy with it.

The moment you can hear people, though, you start judging them as people. About twelve minutes in, a section has just been in contact, they've got a casualty, and the section commander comes up on the net sounding way too happy for my liking. It's my voice. I've only got myself to blame.

It showed up something else too. When the ops room itself spoke, it came out with the radio crackle on it, as if the room was talking to itself over the net. So I've ended up adding a signaller, this chappie at the set, so the room's words come from a real person. The radio he sits at is still a grey box. I can't wait to change it into a real radio model. Come on, Ryan.

02 The drone and the fog of war

The drone is starting to pull its weight. When it's following a call sign, the staff update that call sign's card on the sand table every couple of minutes. With three call signs out that's easy. Imagine six or ten things moving and one drone, and the fog of war comes down fast.

There's also a first look at the drone's thermal camera. Not perfect yet.

03 Into contact

When the first rounds come in, the section gets down into the ditch, the two who can't see the enemy kneel, and the rest get a rapid rate of fire down. I send the contact report up myself, and then the watchkeeper sends his own as well. A poor man's contact report. We'll have to fix that.

04 Getting him out

The casualty is a T3, walking wounded, so a small team brings him back to the CCP while the QRF goes and secures the HLS. And I'll say it now before anyone else does: the CCP in this test is way too far to walk an injured soldier. That's my test scenario, not the game. His MIST comes in, I update the 9-liner so the medics on the helicopter know what to prepare for, green smoke goes up and MERT lands.

05 What I want fixed next

• One contact report, not two.
• The room's orders spoken on the net, not just typed.
• Some of the voices swapped round to suit who's speaking, starting with that section commander.
• The casualty party going firm and taking cover at the CCP instead of standing about.

If you go back and watch playtest 1, then this one, I hope you can see the progress. There's still lots to do. Next up is getting people who aren't us to play it.

Tell us what we're getting wrong on the Discord↗.