But first, a thank you!
Before we dive in, we want to thank all of our players, fans, and founders for sticking with us through Disc Jam’s development, for helping us test, and for your patience along the way. When fatigue sets in, your passion and support is what really keeps us going.

We also really want to thank our families and loved ones for bearing with us as we near completion of our first game as an independent studio. Last week, Tim and I stayed in LA over Thanksgiving to ensure we hit our alpha milestone on time and it looks like we’ll be working through Christmas as well. We’re hopeful all of the hard work will be worth it! Thanks for putting up with us!

So what is alpha? How is this different than the pre-alpha?
These days, many game devs define alpha and beta differently. Often these terms are used more for marketing than to actually describe the state of development. To us, a game has reached alpha when it’s feature complete. This means that all of the features that we expect to ship on day one exist in the game. They may be unpolished, buggy, and/or lack content but they’re there. Let’s take a look at the new features coming online this week that bring us to this milestone:

Upgrade to Unreal Engine 4.13
Although our engine is heavily modified, we’ve integrated the latest performance improvements and bug fixes from Unreal Engine 4.13.

Tutorial

We now have an in-game tutorial! It teaches the basics and helps ramp up new players. We will be adding an Advanced Tutorial in the coming weeks.

Custom Discs

Tags
Players can now select their own Tag. Your Tag is displayed beneath your name wherever your identity is shown.

Taunts

Taunts are finally customizable! We’ve added a load of them this week and they’re a ton of fun.

Victory Poses

These came online in our last patch, but we’ve added a ton of new content here as well as revamped the victory screen flow so that it’s faster, skippable, and a lot more polished!

Jamoleons, the official currency of Disc Jam

Earn Jamoleons by playing public matches. At the end of a match, you will receive a Match Bonus which takes into account various factors such as the duration of the match and whether or not you won. For every 1000J you earn, you can visit:

The Prize Machine

But wait, there’s more!

We’ve also been hard at work polishing the PS4 version of Disc Jam and we’re proud to show off the alpha in person this weekend at PSX in Anaheim. If you’re going to be there, send us a tweet @HighHorseGames and drop by to check it out!

What’s next?
With alpha in the can, it means beta is right around the corner. Right now, we’ve got our heads down getting the final content and gameplay into the game. In addition to everything you see in this build, we still have plenty of exciting updates in the coming months. Expect regular content drops plus all new characters still to be revealed!

The post Disc Jam Alpha Launched – Play This Weekend! appeared first on High Horse Entertainment.

1. Concurrency
Multiplayer games like Disc Jam live and die by their concurrency. If no one is playing, no one can find a match. For this reason, it’s important that we support as many hardware configurations as possible.

2. Performance
Disc Jam is designed to be played at 60 frames per second. If someone is playing on a system that’s unable to sustain that framerate, they’re not experiencing the game as we’ve intended. This may also impact their teammate’s and opponent’s experiences because Disc Jam is an online game first and foremost.

Introducing Disc Jam’s Low-End Renderer

We spent the last couple of weeks getting a second rendering pipeline up and running that is capable of rendering much faster on integrated and low-end GPUs. Although it supports only a subset of our primary renderer’s features, we think it still looks pretty darn good.

To give it a go, simply launch the game from Steam and select the option labeled “Play Disc Jam (use renderer for low-end PCs)”. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on this new experimental option on our forums.

UPDATE 10/11/2016:
For more technical details, check out our article on Intel.com!

The post Integrated and Low-End GPU Support appeared first on High Horse Entertainment.

EVO Wrap Up

Our first EVO was an unbelievable experience. We were a bit nervous to bring our little indie game to the biggest FGC tournament in history. We knew this was a crowd of very intelligent gamers with high expectations and a deep understanding of competitive games. To our delight, Disc Jam received a very warm welcome. So warm, in fact, that we decided to hold a tournament on the second day of EVO which ended up being much bigger than we had planned for!

After 3 and a half hours of single elimination we finally had a champion! The late rounds were incredibly tense and we really enjoyed watching Hakeem “The Dream” win the finals in a 3 set thriller! Duncan was understandably crestfallen but all of the competitors displayed admirable sportsmanship and most importantly everyone had fun!

Demoing Disc Jam for 26 hours in 2 days was exhausting, but closing out EVO with a tourney of our own was a blast and we expect that we’ll see a lot of new players in this week’s playtest. So with that, let’s dive into the new mechanics!

Juiced Mechanic

If you’ve been chatting with us on our Twitch stream, you know we have been discussing streak-based mechanics for some time. The idea of rewarding players for perfect execution was something we have been kicking around and that’s what led to our implementation of JUICED. Put simply, three perfect throws in a row and your player becomes JUICED, which increases your throw speed as long as you maintain the streak.

So far, we’re very happy with this new mechanic because it rewards high level play without alienating novice players. At very high levels, winning or losing a point can often come down to the first person to miss a perfect throw. It introduces a nice layer of strategy as players lob or play their opponent into a slide to break up a perfect throw streak.

It puts more emphasis on executing the deflection mechanic as well since super throws also contribute to the JUICED streak. Work on those mix-ups and be sure to dial in your timing because even a missed perfect on kickoff can potentially cost you the point!

Scoring Bank Mechanic

Another topic of discussion on our channel has been scoring. We’ve been debating the merit of variable-point end zones for some time and we decided that lobbing to punish a player who is out of position should be just as valuable as scoring by throwing to the end zone.

Disc Jam is about moving your opponent around the court to create openings. You should be thinking 1-2 shots ahead to setup your chance to score and, unfortunately, that wasn’t reflected in how we were awarding points. It’s difficult to force your opponents out of position ​and​ aim for a particular end zone. As a result, it was often pure luck whether a goal ended up netting you 3 or 5 points.

To address this, we’ve added something we’re very excited about in the SCORE BANK! Now, all points are worth the same amount, but that amount increases as the point carries on. The value of the current point is displayed in the center of the net:

Starting with a base value of 5 points, each change in possession (each throw) adds 1 to the total value of the point, and sets are first to 50. In this new design, epic rallies are worth more than short flubbed points that end after only a few throws. As many of you have noticed, the disc speeds up over the course of the point. Now, the tension is higher than ever as longer points are more valuable with each throw. Nerves begin to crack as the disc is getting faster and the score bank creeps toward a game changing point value. Big momentum swings are happening and sets are playing out much more dramatically. Hop in some matches and let us know what you think!

Now let’s Jam!

Hopefully you enjoy the new mechanics as much as we do. Love it or hate it, we welcome and encourage your feedback so please let us know what you think on our forums or join the discussion live during our Twitch stream.

The post EVO Wrap Up and Playtest Build Notes appeared first on High Horse Entertainment.

THURSDAY NIGHT JAM
Every Thursday – Starting July 21st
3pm to 3am EST (New York)
12pm to 12am PST (Los Angeles)
16:00 to 4:00 BRST (São Paulo)
19:00 to 7:00 GMT (London)
20:00 to 8:00 CET (Paris)
22:00 to 10:00 MSK (Moscow)

Why the wait? I want to play RIGHT NOW!
Well, we’re still investigating bug reports from our last test, but we’ve also got some really exciting changes to gameplay and scoring in the works and we need to get them finished up before we make another build. We’ll be putting up another blog post soon with more details on what’s new!

Why this day and time? I can’t play!
A few months ago, we sent out a survey asking players their ideal playtest times and the vast majority of respondents said that weeknights were best. We chose Thursday evenings so that we could respond to feedback on Fridays and iterate on that feedback at the start of the following week. We understand that some people may not be able to play on Thursdays, but we feel it is important to have a regular schedule that players can rely on. If enough people are participating, we will open up a second day of the week for testing.

The post Announcing Thursday Night Jam! Weekly playtests beginning July 21st appeared first on High Horse Entertainment.

3pm to 9pm EST (New York)
12pm to 6pm PST (California)
16:00 to 22:00 BRST (São Paulo)
19:00 to 1:00 GMT (London)
20:00 to 2:00 CET (Paris)
22:00 to 4:00 MSK (Moscow)

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).

The post Disc Jam Wins Best of MIX E3 and Playtest #4 Announced! appeared first on High Horse Entertainment.

Today, that work pays off and we’re happy to announce that Disc Jam is officially coming to PlayStation 4! While Steam remains a priority for us, Disc Jam will launch simultaneously on both platforms and we’re excited to extend the Disc Jam community to PC and console gamers alike. Disc Jam has always played best with a controller, so bringing it to PlayStation is a natural fit. Check out how far the game has come in our official announce trailer:

If you’re going to be at E3, come check out Disc Jam in person! We’re going to be hosting a playable demo at the MIX event tonight at LA Live.

Lastly, to everyone that has helped us test the game so far: THANK YOU! We know that many of you have been asking for more playtests; rest assured, they are just around the corner. Shortly after E3, we will be posting an update detailing all of the new features as well as a new playtest schedule. Stay tuned!

The post Disc Jam @ E3 and PS4 Officially Announced! appeared first on High Horse Entertainment.

Makenna is ready to JAM!

The number one request on our trello board was adding a second character so we are very excited to welcome Makenna to the playing field! What she lacks in throw power, Makenna makes up for in SPEED. Smother your opponent and cover lots of ground as Makenna flies around the court. While her slide does not travel as far, her initial burst is more impactful. This means that players can get to just about anything but will need to be careful about relying too heavily on slide as a defensive measure.

Skill Curves – Left Stick + A

We are incredibly excited to debut the new analog throw input which enables players to move the disc virtually anywhere they want. As you press A to throw the disc, you can roll the left stick in either direction to add spin to your throw. The curve angle is controlled by the size of the arc on the left stick. How much spin is on the disc is indicated by how much the disc is tilting as it travels. In addition, players can skip the disc along the wall by applying maximum spin and rolling the disc into the near-side bumpers. Of course, straight throws are still possible by pointing and throwing as usual.

Quick Curves – RT and LT

One-button curve throws still exist on RT and LT. We wanted to make sure these throws felt unique so we modified the timing to make RT/LT Quick Curves the fastest throws in the game. If your opponent is recovering and you have an open shot, snap off an RT/LT Quick Curve to take advantage of players who are out of position.

End Game UI and Menu Reskin

Let the rivalries begin! One of our top requests was allowing players to instantly rematch their opponent. We’ve added a match recap screen to give players some time to fire off smack talk and vote for a rematch. If both players agree to another match, the next round begins instantly! In addition, we’ve reskinned every UI element in the game. Expect more changes here as our menu art and UI flow is still very much a work in progress.

32-bit Windows Supported

We had a lot of requests for a 32-bit Windows build so we are excited to welcome more new players to Disc Jam!

Jam with us on March 18th & 19th

That just about covers the major updates to Disc Jam. We’ve made a ton of other improvements so come join the fun at discjamgame.com! Our next playtest has just been announced so tell your friends and let’s get out there and JAM!

The post Disc Jam Test #3: Introducing Makenna and Skill Curves! appeared first on High Horse Entertainment.

As always, we are eager to hear your thoughts and answer questions, so drop by our discussion forums and give us a shout!

What do I do next?
Make sure you’ve redeemed your Steam key and downloaded the game client. If you haven’t yet received your key, please check out this post on our forums.

How do I play?
Check out our ‘How To Jam’ page for a description of the rules, the controls, and some tips on how to jam like a pro. Once you’re launched Disc Jam, you can check out the ‘How to Play’ option in the main menu. If you’re already in a match, you can also press Start or ESC to open the in-game menu and get a refresher.

Can I use a controller?
Yes! In fact, we recommend using a Microsoft Xbox 360 or Microsoft Xbox One controller for the best experience. If you don’t have one, no worries, you can still play using a traditional keyboard.

Can I stream or post videos?
Definitely! Everyone is encouraged to stream the game and upload footage wherever they wish. We’re excited to share the game with the world, build a community, and get everyone involved in helping us make Disc Jam the best game it can be.

The post Disc Jam Online Test 2: Play on Saturday! appeared first on High Horse Entertainment.

What do I do next?
In the meantime, make sure you’ve redeemed your Steam key and downloaded the game client. If you haven’t yet received your key, visit discjamgame.com and sign up. You’ll receive a key as soon as your email address is verified.

How do I play?
Check out our ‘How To Jam’ page for a description of the rules, the controls, and some tips on how to jam like a pro. Once you’re playing, you can also press Start or ESC to open the in-game menu and get a refresher. If you want to see the game in action, check out our gameplay footage from IndieCade.

Can I use a controller?
Yes! In fact, we recommend using a Microsoft Xbox 360 or Microsoft Xbox One controller for the best experience. If you don’t have one, no worries, you can still play using a traditional keyboard.

Can I stream or post videos?
Definitely! Everyone is encouraged to stream the game and upload footage wherever they wish. We’re excited to share the game with the world, build a community, and get everyone involved in helping us make Disc Jam the best game it can be.

The post Disc Jam Online Test 1: Play This Weekend! appeared first on High Horse Entertainment.

IndieCade was an unbelievable experience. As first time presenters showing brand new IP, we had a lot of butterflies going into the show. It would have been crushing if our demo fell flat considering the long hours of preparation. We worked around the clock to tighten up our build, assemble enough presentable media for our booth, and buy/setup the equipment we needed to present. Thankfully, the show went great and Icon: Disc Jam got a wonderful reception!

Armed with my living room TV and a bunch of Disc Jam swag we headed to Culver to meet the team from Epic. The support we received from the Unreal Engine staff was critical to the success of our demo. They had us covered in every way which freed us up to demo the game and meet the IndieCade crowd.

All of our pre-show jitters melted away as demos began and people were immediately picking up Disc Jam’s core mechanics. The level of execution we saw from new players instantly reinforced our focus on accessibility. We were also delighted to find the skill gap to be wide enough that poor, average, and excellent players distinctly separated themselves upon learning how to play. Entering the show, we had no way of knowing whether we executed these core tenets of our design philosophy. We left IndieCade with renewed excitement that casual and hard core gamers alike are interested in the type of games we want to make.

We even threw together an impromtu tournament on Saturday with the winner taking home some High Horse gear!

After 3 long days of pitching the game, Jay and I were exhausted, a little sunburnt, but mostly just exhilarated that people actually liked what we were showing. Overall, the show was a massive success. We made excellent contacts, hung out with some incredibly talented developers, and ultimately learned a great deal about how to present our game. BIG THANKS to Epic without whom we never could have pulled it off.

Shortly after IndieCade we were thrilled to find out that Icon: Disc Jam made it through Steam Greenlight! This means we can use Steam’s network backend for matchmaking, invites, and friends lists. More importantly, it means we can distribute builds to the community! We’ll be rolling out the pre-alpha in phases using our mailing list so be sure to sign up if you haven’t already.

The post We’re Greenlit! IndieCade Wrap Up and Singles Gameplay appeared first on High Horse Entertainment.