This week Demigod goes into private Gamma testing.  It’ll be in Gamma for about a week (and no more than a week and a half in order to make the April 14th street date).

So what are the changes you can expect from the beta to final?  We’ll know a lot more this week but here are some general things that are on our mind:

1. Lots and lots of balance tweaks based on feedback. See http://forums.demigodthegame.com/342558 to get a sampling.
    
2. Implementation of Multiplayer Skirmish.  That’s where you choose a Demigod and press fight and the match making finds someone for you to play with.
    
3. Impulse Reactor Overlay. The ability to send messages to friends, chat, user score, etc.
    
4. Impulse Reactor NAT. This is the infamous connectivity stuff. Unlike most games, Demigod is pure peer-to-peer in order to reduce in-game latency. The challenge, however is that EVERYONE has to be able to send and receive UDP packets (in most games, only the host needs to do that).  This past week, the lead developer of RAKNet was at Stardock to help in this area.  We expect to have a new beta of Demigod this week with some of these changes in.
   
5. Impulse Integration.  We’re going to try to put as much useful information into Impulse for finding and getting games going as possible. So data like disconnects, rank, etc. will start to be displayed. You’ll be able to pick a game, click launch and be inserted
   into that game.  This is an area we plan to expand on after release as well.
    

Impulse Reactor: Phase 3 internal beta