Daily Report - 30/12/2023 (Patreon)

Our 2nd big playtest

I guess it’s going pretty well?

Yesterday we released our 3rd devlog for Songs of Everjade already, which was a bit of a stressful affair, since we’ve had a very sudden and massive influx of new users, most of whom came from my video where I talk about how I don’t like devlogs.

This hasn’t been much of an issue however it seems, as nobody really seemed to mind our devlog style. Video performance has been doing good as well, which has meant that we’ve gotten a lot of feedback already.

The main issues seem to be the following so far:

• Huge performance issues in the gardens stage
• The camera is too zoomed in / movement is too fast for the scale we’re at
• Pixel art isn’t there yet (we knew this)
• Still not enough player feedback
• Combat was still kind of unbalanced/weird, with archers being extremely punishing
• …

Overall, most of the issues mentioned are things we will be able to solve. I also want to highlight that not everything is bad (our viewers just like to help by pointing out everything), since there definitely was a “wow” effect for a lot of the commenters who watched our previous devlog and could compare to the current state of the game. We’ll definitely get there.

What’s next
We’re just going to let the feedback flow in over the weekend, and then regroup next year. I’m going to take a day off for now.

" People are more likely to notice what's wrong than what's right.” - Roy F. Baumeister

Marnix Wyns

Producer & Creative Director @ BiteMe Games