A studio called One Dawn has been hard at work for the past year or so working on a top-down military experience that will have you sweating and shooting bullets. Titled Operation: Valor, One Dawn is looking at bringing warfare away from the standard genre of first-person shooters that all herald gritty violence and constant knifings gone awry, for a more birds-eye view of the ever-shifting battlefields that are a bit more true-to-life.
It’s definitely not a take for everyone, but from what One Dawn Studios has shown on their Twitter feed thus far, it’s smart to keep the fingers on its pulse as it crawls ever-closer to an actual release. The title already has a Steam page up that’s noticeably barren save for a singular image, and the studio has claimed its intent multiple times for starting up a Kickstarter to get the title some funding to help flesh out the bones already in place. While the first mention of the Kickstarter originally was marked for 2019, One Dawn has suppressed that into the current timeframe of Q2/Q3 of 2020.
This is likely where you come in; One Dawn is looking for fans of the genre to help in the Closed Alpha test that is coming up shortly to help the title finally come to Kickstarter.
It’s an easy opportunity to sink your teeth into what warfare meat is already present, and also help guide the title to success with your input. Granted, Alpha testing doesn’t mean that you’re simply going to play a game until you want to explore something else; it’s a sort of pledge that many take to help developers up there titles standards and deliverables.
In Closed Alpha’s, you can typically expect a heavy slew of bugs that you’ll need to adequately note in regards to the cause and effect (meaning you’ll need to intentionally trigger bugs multiple times), the title crashing to desktop, placeholder elements that end up increasing the difficulty as you try to chew through a hard area with no UI, and all sorts of unspeakable things that would cause a normal human to throw their keyboard across the room.
In exchange, you get to influence a game from its early life into a complete title, experience development patterns and help bolster your resume if this is the kind of task that you find yourself enjoying. With patience and solid writing skills, you can offer your services to studios internationally in a much-needed experience; a great foot in the door of game development yourself.
If it looks like a title that you’d be interested in yourself, there’s little reason to not hop in and at least try to mature the title a bit. Just know what you’re signing up for, which is a statement that military recruiters should use a bit more liberally.