A new weapon, Playtest feedback, Demo grind (Patreon)

New weapon

One thing that our game was missing as well was some unique weapons. Let's be honest, a simple sword, whilst technically lore accurate, wasn't the most unique. We've now expanded our warrior's arsenal by adding the Qiang, a Chinese spear. There will be 2 attack types, a weighty stab, and a 360 degree spear wipe. 

As part of having that new kind of weapon, we also needed a new interactable object, the weapon-rack (the art is placeholder). The goal is that every class gets 3 weapons, which are unlocked by completing milestones / gaining more followers. 

Playtest

Last week we released our 3rd devlog for Songs of Everjade, paired with another playtest. About 70 people played the game, and shared their experience with us. 

There were a lot of other things we learned from the playtest, such as having very OP archers, questionable art in certain areas (we knew that), and some UI/UX questions (we will have to make our blessing clearer still). The good news here is that we haven't really had any big issues, and people generally seemed to enjoy the game (apart from the grossly overpowered archers, we toned them down). We were still lacking the final item variety we wanted, with only 3 artifacts implemented, which was also a bit of a let down for some. 

One issue that surprised us was heavy performance issues, even on high-end PCs. This was something that we hadn't encountered before during our own internal testing, so it once again shows the important of testing early & often. In this case, the issue was that we had forgotten a log statement, which would cause the game to die if it was installed on a hard drive instead of SSD due to all the I/O operations. Whoopsie!

Progress Grab Bag

Some extra, smaller improvements we added over the past week:

- Added a lot more SFX

- Added more gears, artifacts & heirlooms (nothing too fancy)

- A lot of bug fixes, mostly related to incorrect stat changes

What's Next?

We're rapidly approaching Steam Next Fest, and with that comes the need to make a more solid demo available as well. For this upcoming demo we have a mini checklist of the following features that still need to be done:

- Weapon switching

- More garden rooms & enemies (and making the rooms larger in general)

- More tutorials / explanations / hints in our UI (and go over some of the bad UI parts)

- Updating some of our SFX and adding some VFX as well

As you can see, the weapon switching is already well on its way. The rooms will take 1-2 days probably as well to get right. We've also sent out another order for 60 new tiles for our garden, which we'll also still be able to implement before we get our demo out. 

It will definitely be a busy next few weeks, but I believe we'll be able to keep up the pace, and push a lot of cool improvements.