What a Run! 

Thank you to everyone who joined up to playtest with us last week. We had an absolute blast running with you all, finally. 

First things first… We’ll be holding another playtest on Saturday, May 16th from 10:00 AM – 2:00 PM (PST). We had a lot of people in with us on Friday, and we heard that you all want to Run on a weekend and that you want more time with the game. We’re gonna do both – moving to Saturday and adding another hour to the next playtest. We’ll be on PC for this one. We know there’s a lot of people who want a Console playtest – we hear you and we’re working on it (more coming soon here). 

We run these playtests for a very important reason – get you into the game, get your feedback and make the game better based on your feedback. We saw y’all hitting logo 3’s, breaking ankles, snatching monster blocks, posterizing dunks and more… All for the Chip! We also heard your feedback on what to improve – more polished animations, improved passing, tuning & balance and you want to know more about how Rank & Progression works.

On animations, we intentionally decided to go with a stylized look & feel for our game. We want this game to feel crafted and have a look of its own. Every single animation is hand keyed from scratch (this is a LOT more work than mocap). But we hear you – you don’t like the stylized look & feel, so we’re changing it up. We’re still going to be hand keyed, but we’re revising all core animation sets to feel way more athletic, way less bouncy and much more how you’d expect a professional athlete to naturally move. This is not a small lift, but we’re committed to making a great looking, feeling and playing game – so we’re doing it. This is our #1 focus as a team, and we’ll have brand new animations in-game for you all to check out in our next playtest.

Next up, passing. We heard a lot of feedback about passing not looking great, not having enough variation and floating passes. We’ve made a number of changes to help minimize these issues and make passing look & feel better overall. We’ve tuned passing distances, added stylized passing animations and we’re ironing out how best to transition from moves to passing instantaneously. The key is (with all of these changes) that we never want the game to play bad in order to get something to look good. We’re finding that balance to improve the look, feel and variation of animations without losing the responsiveness of player control. 

Tuning & Balance – we’ve made a ton of changes that you’ll see in the next playtest. We’ve increased dunk distances (no more 3ft floaters!), added a new system that rewards set shooters (making running shots harder to pull off), reduced shooting effectiveness from beyond half court, made cherry picking more difficult to pull off, sped up passing, tuned shoves to be more difficult + cost more energy, made Off the Heezay more rewarding & easier to pull off, changed camera swap button mapping and a whole bunch of other bug fixes & improvements. 

In terms of Rank & Progression, we’ll be doing a walkthrough video of The Shop & The Locker soon to give you some more details on how it all works. The high level design is that we put the power in your hands – as you Rank up and earn CRED, you get to choose what you want to purchase and equip. We don’t want you ripping packs, we’re not gonna feed you filler content you don’t want, etc. You’re going to Rank up, buy the things you like (based on your Rank & CRED) and take it to the courts. 

Last point – I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. We’re a small independent Development Team. We’ve got 18 Employees working at Play by Play, and all told we’re 30 people on the Team. We’re a fraction of the size of a standard AAA Team, but we have very high expectations for ourselves and this game, and we want to deliver. 

We appreciate all of your feedback (the good & the bad), keep it coming. Our Team is on Discord, we’re watching your YouTube videos, we see your posts and we take it all to heart. Don’t shy away from telling us what you like, dislike and want to see in the future. We see this as a game that we can build together, and if we do it right – there’s no telling where The Run could go. 

Crew Up & we’ll see you on May 16th for the next RUN.

• Scott Probst

Playtest Sign-Ups: nbatherun.firstlook.gg