What is Halt The Heist! The actual game - and how to get playin'

The new big version 1.0.09 is finally out!

Hey, person on the internet! As you may see this post, you may also be interested in our game Halt The Heist! Cool!  Just a notice, but as the game is not that big, we encourage players to join our Discord-server, where we team up and play together. Most info about the game, updates, known bugs, and vice versa is posted there, here is just for general and major updates

So let us get back to the main topic. What is Halt The Heist, and where are we going with the game?

We've been developing Halt The Heist for about 2 months as of today and we are just getting started! Motivation in the dev-team is as high as ever as the game gets prettier and prettier, as well as better. We just want to quick thank our beta-testers and we are grateful for the attention and feedback we've gotten so far!

Our new version finally gets a lot of stuff together which makes the game a lot more playable by miles, and is one of our most important updates to our game. We feel we finally have a game that is "worth" playing, and we now really can focus on how to make the game better as a whole. Check out features we intent to add in our Discord.

A quick list of updated feature and bug-fixes:

- Improved map
- Improved collisions and fixed Lost
- Reworked some lighting
- Added text-popups to make it more clear what to do sometimes
- Christmas tree
- Throwable knives
- Reworked the selection system
- Reworked Arrest/Kill/Catch
- Added hacker-art
- Added proper win/lose -screen
- Added replayable lobbies
- Added better loading
- Improved performance
- More map-decorations
- Checking for old versions
- Improving network-reliability when joining public server

Focusing on the gameplay

First, let's see what we've got so far in game. If you have played the game, you know that there are 4 roles; Thief, Hacker, Saboteur and Guard. Here is some basic info: 

The Guards have a lot going on as you see. Though, in-game it sometimes can be a bit tedious looking and searching for the thief, so we are thinking about doing something about this without further complicating the game. It should though be noted that this is not a big or really significant problem, as the game quickly can become high-paced, and with the Saboteur the game doesn't get boring at all. It is just important to note what the player *actually* does when playing

The Thief got a lot going on. Our main focus-point for this role is to make the communication with the Hacker more freely, maybe also make it more accessible by adding a "phone" to text and/or sending pictures instead of it only working  with voicechat

Our main focus for this role is to make the "screen" more manageable, because it is.. not so much. We need to work out a better layout here, and easier-to-understand as well, but most works well here. (maybe also something to describe exactly what to do)

Well, last but not at all least, the twist to the game, the Saboteur. Our main focus here is to make the knife-drop more meaningful, or maybe just a rework as it is a bit confusing to many players how to make it work well.

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By focusing on each role and how they communicate we are aiming to make the game easier-to-understand and playable for each role. This is one of our main focuses for the future:

What's next, and for the future?

Now that the game works pretty well, with a few exceptions, we are increasingly shifting our focus towards gameplay. It is important for us that the gameplay is well balanced and works, so the game is fun no matter which role you get. One of our greatest drawback from our game is that it only really works 100% with voicechat, but this is also something we are working towards making better and more accessible. We are also looking into to expand the range of players from 6-8 players, as this is a roadblock for the players if they are too many or too few in most cases. To combat this we have created the public lobby, but of course this doesn't solve the problem as a whole at all. Just a small step. Many players has also said that the game sometimes is way too dark, so we have also added some light around the player, and we are working on some sort of minimap to make the map more sense. So, the questions the dev-team is currently working with is mostly:

• How do we make the game more accessible?
• How do we balance the gameplay?
• How do we simplify the game or just make it easier to understand?

As feedback is crucial to our games development, we encourage everyone who has played the game, and especially this new version, to fill out a feedback-form: https://forms.gle/stVraf9Jp223pPZg7

As with our development up until this point, we intend to keep you updated on the progress we are making with the game, new version, bugs and so on. So stay safe out there and happy holidays from the dev-team at ByteTaleStudios! We're excited about the future, and the new version!