Daily Report - 06/12/2023 (Patreon)

Massive gameplay improvements

New Controls

One other key piece of feedback we received from our playtest was the weird aiming, as it was linked to the player’s direction. This was fine on controller, as you had a lot of granularity with your joystick, but near impossible to actually aim when using keyboard + mouse to play the game. Because of that, William has now overhauled our control scheme, and separated our aiming and direction controls. The controls also had to be overhauled as your hand had to do very weird stuff otherwise when playing on controller with 2 joysticks.

Music please
One of the things that was very placeholder, but actually received positive feedback on our playtest was our choice of music, being the very traditional Chinese style. There were a key issue with it however, the fact that it wasn’t looping. This meant we got very jarring transitions. Now that we’ve got some new, better fitting beats, this already helps a lot in making the game’s experience better, now just imagine having proper SFX and we’ll almost have a full game, right?

Now, we’ve used part of our Fiverr budget to commission two 60s long loops, one combat loop, and one calmer homebase loop. These songs really fit the vibe, and for the very low price of $55/min of audio, we will probably commission some more stuff as we get further along the development (do I hear full OST?) For reference, all of our other offers in terms of “real” composers has been around $250 - $400/60s of music.

What’s next
Thomas got COVID (is this your 3rdtime already?) so I expect a bit of a drop in productivity, but we plan for those.  As for me and William, I think right now we will be focusing further on implementing some much needed UX improvements still that came up from the playtest, as well as throw in the occasional sprite here and there.

" Game development is a marathon, not a sprint. You are being chased by a pack of hungry bears however, who will end your existence the moment you stop giving your all.”

Marnix Wyns

Producer & Creative Director @ BiteMe Games