Rise of the Pixels Open Beta is Live!

5 months ago

Things are moving fast in the "Pixelverse", just yesterday I wrote about the sale being live with Licenses and 8-Bit packs and today we just got access for Open Beta!

How to get access to Open Beta ?

They have a different website than the main game for Beta testing at https://beta.riseofthepixels.com/shop

To be able to access Open Beta, all you need is to buy the License pack or at least one 8-bit pack at their main game website https://riseofthepixels.com/shop (The main game packs are not openable yet).

To get your packs to show up on the Beta site for testing, you need to have clicked the "Accept & Join" button. Or as @jfuji told me on discord, "engage big red button" :D (Speaking of which, you should join the Discord if you haven't already).

What's in the Open Beta

After you have read the description of the Open beta phase and engaged with the red button, you can start playing around with the features of the game.

In the Beta none of your actions have an impact in the main game, everything is only for testing purposes. You are also given more packs than you have bought in the main game. Nothing you open from packs are real NFT's so thread carefully if you are scared of using up all your luck on legendary pulls :) Also the PXL_BETA tokens are only for the Beta website and cannot be transferred to the main game or out of the game. After having fun on the Beta website you can leave your feedback in the Discord (There are special Beta discussion channels).

Let's get to it

Let's head straight to "Resource Hub" and open up our packs. I opened up 1 License pack and 7 "8-Bit" packs as seen in my logbook

From the 8 packs (1 being license) I received as expected 8 Team member NFT's and 8 Accessory NFT's. Luckily for me I didn't get lucky on the Beta Server. For both categories I got 1 Rare and 7 commons as well as 950 PXL_Beta coins.

We are shown for each NFT their Skill, Speed & PXL_Beta cost per hour stats. Looks like none of my team members have traits from the start and it says "Unlocked at higher XP" when hovering over the trait section. At the current Beta state, we can't Fuse or Sell any of the cards.

At a closer look I noticed that almost all of my Team members are Developers and there is only one lonely designer amongst them, so it seems that Designers are a bit rarer than Developers (or with a sample size as small as mine, it's just how my luck turned out).

*On top left it says what the profession is

From the accessories I only got Mouses and Keyboards, but there are also Monitors and Headsets available. It looks like every Team member NFT can be equipped with up to 4 Accessory NFT's (1 of each), so getting a mix of things will be quite useful in the main game.
The accessories seem to cost roughly 10 times less PXL_Beta per hour than the Team member NFT's do, and subsequently give 10 times less skill and speed (Just an observation by me).

*The filters reveal all the possibilites *

Looking at my starting setup if I put all my team members to work with the accessories equipped, I would be spending 26.75 PXL_Beta per hour at which rate I could run them for roughly 35 hours before I run out of PXL_Beta.

My developers would have a total speed of 18.17 + accessories and skill of 22.53 + accessories,
and designers would have speed of 1.36 + accessories and skill of 3.64 + accessories.

We don't know yet what the requirements for developing a game look like, but with a setup like this I would definitely be worried about my design apartment and would most likely try to trade out one or two of my developers for designers.
We also do not have access to fusions yet, which could also help out tremendously with the traits coming from XP also.

My thoughts

The website of the game looks really clean and everything worked smooth. Before we get actual game development action, we still don't have much to go off of in terms of the actual game, but it was really fun opening up my packs to see what I could potentially get.
Thanks to the Beta we can also start slowly thinking about how we would want to allocate our Speed and Skill between designers and developers. Judging by the Whitepaper "Games" section, we will have to prioritize different aspects of our development process, so I would definitely go with extra Developers rather than designers.

Let me know what you got from your Open Beta packs, did you waste all your luck :D ?