Devlog #006 - Commit #1980 (Patreon)

One week of February down, a few more to go. This month always felt short to me.

...I mean, it is, objectively. Anyway.

Game Implementation

I'm attempting to ignore the still-monumental amount of episodes that are ahead of me. (About 25!) It's mostly working.

The good news is I started and more or less finished all of Episode 3-2 in the time since the last post. Granted, a lot of the op was salvaged from an older (bad) iteration of 2-4, meaning I didn't have to make too many new assets. But still, I'm happy with the pace.

Whoa, funky animal anatomy! Just as advertised?!

I've already started on 3-3 and 3-4, too. Yippee. Can't wait to finish 3-6, as that'll be nearly the halfway point.

Alpha Testing

Episode 2-5 was released to Residents and higher, and seemed decent overall. In case you weren't aware, these alphas are "early" versions of mostly-complete episodes. That includes both the operation and the story bits. (I don't plan on any story-only episodes.)

I say "early" since these are more or less completed, fully-playable episodes. There might be a few things to tweak and polish, but barring major hurdles, they're quite close to the finished product.

(Actually, 1-6 did encounter a major hurdle: the operation and story were a bit awkward, and it just didn't feel fun. I went back and overhauled it, and in the second round of alpha testing, people seemed to like it a lot better.)

There are several things I'm looking out for in these alphas:

Is the operation appropriately challenging? Cheesable? Broken? Fun?

Did people understand what they had to do? How long did it take them to figure it out? Was there anything frustrating? Can they completely ignore the dialogue and still manage to complete the op?

Are the score thresholds for each rank for each difficulty tuned properly?

Does the story make sense? Are the characters in character? Is the story interesting? Do people feel like stuff is actually happening in the story?

Bugs and typos and plenty more.

I also do try and test with in-person friends as well. The more eyes I can get on each op, the better, 'cuz try as I may, it's really hard to gauge how an operation feels after playing it what feels like 100 times.

The benefit? Upon 1.0, each and every episode will be nicely ironed out and smooth. Hopefully~

Next Week

Well, last week's items of "2-5 alpha" and "3-2" are actually done! That's cool.

Hopefully I'll have 3-3 done by next time, though I anticipate it might take a bit longer. That's fine, ideal pace is ~2 weeks per episode. We shall see~

As a bonus for reading this far (or, perhaps you scrolled to the bottom), please enjoy - digs through screenshot folder - this screenshot of the old title screen.

And enjoy a superb owl (?) tomorrow if that's your thing!