Beta was fairly different to Alpha in many key areas. Primarily, I worked less on mechanics and more on implementing assets and tying them into premade systems and mechanics. For example, when implementing animations I had to swap out the placeholder meshes, which led to some strange issues with one of the player pawns character movement components that I eventually fixed through brute force. These conflicts were far and few between thankfully, and never truly hindered me from working on the game.
Most of my biggest contributions to beta were by far the tweaks to the game's mechanics (and implementation of yet another conductor attack) that I made to make the game 'feel' both more challenging and fair at the same time. Some of the biggest feedback we got from our alpha QA test were that the game was either far too easy or far too hard, showing that balance wasn't in favour of the 'average', which would provide the best experience for both extremes of the scale. This included changing timings for attacks, tweaking damage values, tweaking the secondary values of some of the attacks (stab now heals for double its damage), and the implementation of assets to make a more complete looking game. The new attack implemented came with its own set of issues, such as being able to hit the player even when missing at seemingly random times (which is now fixed), along with attack timings making it difficult to dodge the attack, as you would land back on the ground by the time that the conductor fired off their next attack.
Team dynamics were mostly the same for beta, with more focus on individual work as assets neared completion for implementation into the game. Some of my issues with team meetings, such as them not really raising many issues we had or communication being particularly poor towards the end of beta, but overall progress has been an improvement over alpha. Going forward, I hope to be able to better communicate my issues and what I need done, as it's everyone's responsibility.
The biggest issue for the project at the moment is getting assets completed and into engine. We're nearing the end of production, and yet we don't have the main enemy or player's actual sprites implemented. The player is just placeholder animated sprites, while the conductor is still made of primitives. This might end up not ever being fixed, as we only have one week of gold standard before production is over and post-production begins. As such, I can only work on what is already in engine and polishing it to the best of my ability.
Overall, beta has been solid for implementing assets into engine despite setbacks with sprite work and certain models / maps. Almost all 3D assets are in-game now, so all we await is sprites. Additionally, some of my concerns from alpha for beta (such as how GitHub merging will go) were nowhere near as difficult to do, which resulted in a smooth implementation of the game's maps.