Disc Jam Wins Best of MIX E3 and Playtest #4 Announced!

Now that the dust has settled after an exciting E3 week, let’s chat about what’s new in this build and get another playtest on the books. Disc Jam was playable at the Indie Media Exchange E3 showcase where we were honored to win the “Best of The MIX E3” award!

After much preparation and many tireless hours, Disc Jam was ready for E3 with some big updates and a new platform to announce! In case you missed the news, check out our previous post where we announced Disc Jam is coming to PS4 and debuted our new trailer.

During E3, we had the pleasure of showing Disc Jam at The MIX E3 which is an awesome event for helping indie teams get exposure by bringing developers and games press together. MIX puts on events at many of the major games conferences so be sure to check them out if you want to see what exciting new indie titles are around the corner. To our delight, we were recently notified that Disc Jam was awarded Best of The MIX E3!

The next morning, we caught up with Unreal Engine community guru Chance Ivey to chat about Disc Jam’s design. If you’re interested in hearing about the early stages of Disc Jam’s development, check out our interview with the Unreal Engine team:

The Disc Jam mini-press tour continued as we took to the Sony stage to announce on their official live stream that Disc Jam would be coming to PS4. See below for our Sony interview and please forgive the nervous rambling!

Let’s not forget amidst all this excitement that Disc Jam has received a ton of updates and is ready for another worldwide playtest! The first change you’ll probably notice is the entire UI has been reskinned and our branding has been finalized.

This update was long overdue as we were getting sick of the blockout UI we’ve been using during the pre-alpha. While I’m sure we’ll be tweaking some elements going forward, we don’t expect any wholesale changes and for better or for worse this will be the UI we ship with:

One MASSIVE update we are excited to share is that Disc Jam’s backend is now fully functional! While you may not find this as exciting as in-game features, this crucial component of our architecture enables many key features of Disc Jam’s design. Not only does it enable us to store player stats and match records, it also opens the door for our progression, ranked matchmaking, and character customization implementations. We had a lot of vendors to evaluate and we were very happy to find that GameSparks suited our needs perfectly. Stay tuned for a more technical blog post detailing how we arrived at this decision.

With our backend online, we needed to have some customizations for the player to choose from! To that end we added some new skins to Stanton and Makenna. While some are simple palette swaps, others are more wild transformations. Expect a lot more changes here as we hone in on how we deliver customizable content to our users!

Were you sick of sitting at the obnoxious matchmaking submenu? Well so were we and after no small effort we now do all of our matchmaking behind the scenes! This enables players to interact with the menus while matchmaking. Choose your character, customize your skins and accessories, or just check out your stats, all while the game is finding your next match!

Also new in this build are many updates to the environment and character art. Makenna and Stanton each received a much needed face lift. We literally gave Makenna a new face (complete with UE 4.11 hair shader) while Stanton received some updated armor and nifty new cloth tassels. In addition, we’ve added a deflection shield so hopefully blocking the disc reads better than it did before. Keep in mind the deflection mechanic has been updated as well. Instead of tapping the deflection button you can now hold it up indefinitely to be sure you block the disc as intended.

In addition, you’ll notice some updates to the blockout geo we had in our map. We’ve added the new scoreboard design and updated the bumper wall plates to communicate the lateral disc location using floor lights. You’ll also notice we’ve replaced the old score holograms and added a precise disc locator that appears after a point has been awarded. This will hopefully help clear up the ambiguity of how certain points are scored. We’ve also added a bit of polish to the overall disc FX with new particle systems and SFX for many of the throws and impacts.

That about covers it for this update. We’re really looking forward to hearing what you guys think about this latest build so remember the best place to leave feedback is on our forums. We will be streaming this playtest so if you want to chat with us be sure to tune into our twitch page from 2-3pm PST on Saturday and Sunday (subject to change).