A playtest, new controls & much more (Patreon)

Our first playtest

We had already done a previous Patreon playtest, but that one got a bit of a false start. Last weekend, we did a first public playtest, linked to a devlog release as well, and boy did people try out our game. Our devlog performed a lot better, and we also received around 150 different playtest signups. Out of those, quite a few where vocal about their thoughts, but I'll try to summarize what we've got out of it. 

1. The core game itself does seem to show promise, people liked the general atmosphere and vibe of the Chinese mythology, even though that wasn't really the focus of the playtest, and hadn't really been worked out yet.

2. There were still a lot of issues with our worldgen, now that suddenly so many new rooms were being generated. These issues where two-fold. First, we were missing out on certain wall connection sprites, which left gaping holes in our walls where 2 rooms met. Second, our auto-door system that places doorways where 2 rooms connect, still had some issues, with a lot of players unable to actually enter the bossroom and fight Xuan Wu.

3. Combat still had some issues, mainly the actual controls (more on that in a second), and the pacing/feel. In regards to the pacing, we've lowered our recharge rates there for everything. With feel, this will be a more iterative process, where we add more kinds of feedback to everything the player does (SFX, screenshake, VFX,...) 

4. There were still a lot of issues, but apart from room generation, no real big bugs or crashes, which is always a good thing as well.

So, now that the playtest is over, we've gotten a lot of new datapoints, and more importantly, validation that what we're doing is actually worth doing. No need to scrap everything and go back to the drawing board for now. We've got our new priorities now, and we'll work towards the next playtest to make it even better. 

New controls

One of the big pieces of feedback we received was that our controls, especially on Keyboard + Mouse were really wack, since we were using directional aiming (shoot wherever the player is facing). On controller, this wasn't as much of an issue, as using a joystick you get pretty good directional control. 

When using KBM, that's a completely different story however, as you could only aim in 8 directions in total, and aiming was much less granular. In order to fix this, we did end up having to switch to more "traditional" twin stick controls. By decoupling movement and aiming, this gives a lot more freedom, especially on KBM, but brings a few extra challenges (ergonomics) to controller that we're trying to fix now. 

Progress grab bag

In the period leading up to our playtest, we still pushed through a lot of smaller QoL updates, that actually had some pretty big impacts on the game:

• We've got some new, custom made, looping soundtracks
• Our practice dummy has been overhauled to be prettier
• Bunch of UX changes, such as speeding up dialogue, a button linked to our Discord on the main menu, better cursor/controller state switching, updated the HUD to be better.
• We overhauled our Steam page text and added Danish localization. Dutch, French, German and Brazilian Portuguese will be coming over the next week. 
• We added a bunch of extra lore content leading up to our playtest

What's next

Now that our first playtest is over, and our game has been further validated, the real work begins. Our room gen is a very important feature we want to work on (although Thomas was spearheading that but he's down with Covid), and otherwise we just want to focus further on getting the combat and feel done better, adding that extra impact, and improving our SFX a bit (just so it doesn't sound like you're picking up actual guns anymore).