This week has been a rollercoaster.  Last week I resolved to start doing internal playtests to see what other people thought of the game.  I told myself that based on the reception, I'd decide how much more time I wanted to spend working on this project.  It's been 3 years of development now and with the limited engagement I've had so far I decided this was the cut off.  I didn't want to admit it, but I was more nervous than I expected, and the result was definitely a surprise.  I'll share them below, but first to the weekly update.

Art

From the art side, Ref has been using the week to help me fill out the third level of the game! This is a huge milestone for me because it represents the second half of development, the half that is past the demo.  This is where I hope to just add a bunch of content and make the most mechanically enjoyable parts of the game since all the questions of loop have been answered.  We decided for this level to build out a burning farmland effected by the moon scorch.  Here are the assets he's been building

I really wanted to explore the idea of everything ravaged everything burned.  I wanted to build a world that's not just messed up in places but fully in the middle of an apocalypse.  I think he'd done a great job sending the message.

Capsule Art

From the Capsule Art side I finally found another artist! I don't want to disclose the name until I've verified with them that it's alright, but I have been a fan of their work for a while because of the exposure they've had from other game developers I know, and I was glad to find that they were willing to take on the project! More to come on this when we produce the first drafts and mock ups.

Programming

From the programming side I've been focusing a lot on building out the new tile sets that Ref has been giving me.  It's not programming per say, but every now and then there are little challenges that crop up! For instance, there is no easy to make a smoking overlay for the level because Unity doesn't support volumetric fog for 2D.  As a result, I've been working on an overlayed sprite on the camera that with the magic of shaders, is able to produce a swirling mist effect which I will cover a dark smokey black.  I looked at some other implementation I liked, but the rest of them were not dealing with infinitely moving tile maps and had significant performance drawbacks, so I 've had to start cooking up ideas of my own.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/graveyard-keeper-how-the-graphics-effe...

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/snhdk6/how_i_created_a_2d_procedural_f...

https://imgur.com/a/fog-system-sanctuary-enter-magnos-JV4gJte

Other than that, I've also been handling some of the more crippling bugs to come out of the playtest I did, and also adding lots of accessibility options for players that had trouble with the base difficulty of the game.  I added:

- Aim assist for controller and mouse
- Dead zone calibration for joysticks
- The ability to decide when the health regen of the player starts triggering
- An auto perfect swap mechanic that will automatically perfect swap the weapon for people who can't get the timing down.  

Hopefully this adds a good variety of little assists that people can use because while I do believe the game is challenging, I also firmly believe it's beatable by anyone that's comfortable with the controls or and familiar with the genre.  Hopefully these assists help people ease overcome those hurdles without lessening the tension that the difficulty curve brings, which in my opinion is the best part of the game!

Playtest

Finally, the moment I've been worrying about most all week.  The dreaded playtest.  As discussed in my previous posts, I used this website to get recruit 25 anonymous tests from all across the world to cut loose and tear my game apart www.gametester.gg

Up until now only friends and family have provided feedback and the first night I kept imagining the worst.  Unfortunately, when I woke up in the morning those fears had managed to manifest themselves.  Even with PAID playtests, I only had 1 review, and it was a "thumbs down, 5/10" on steam.

My Question, what did you like the least about my game, in particular had a pretty hard response to swallow?

• "1- The graphics because everything is too small to understand well whether the attacks hit the character or not, the latter seems to be an ant, sometimes I lose it on the screen, 
• I suggest to define better the graphics and make the main character larger and clear.
• 5- Damages caused by characters on advanced moments of Stage/Level are ridiculous, after 15 minutes passed to take buffs, the maximum of the damage character can do 
• With these damage it is very complex to eliminate the mini-bosses because they have too much health. I recommend rebalancing everything."

Although it wasn't a mean spirited review, these comments were particularly difficult to swallow, because I personally thought Ref's art was VERY good and had spent an extremely long time animating and adding particle effects to just about every part of the game.  Frankly, I just didn't have the money to get better graphics and "rebalance everything" so I braced myself for the worst.  I set my own expectations and prepared for a flood of 24 more bad reviews telling me how bad everything was.  I was about to decide that this was a very bad game and just ship it and move on.

But then...

Something funny happened...

I waited another day, before I looked at the application again, and at this point 13 more people play testers tried out the game.  Then the next day, the remaining 11 did.  And here were the results:

I was floored by this.  And frankly, I still am.  If the results had been 50:50 I would have been pleasantly surprised.  If I had averaged a solid 6/10, I would have been excited.  This reception was not at all what I expected!

And for every negative comment, or piece of very legitimate feedback that I will most definitely be updating, I got some comments that quite honestly I still can't fully believe is talking about the hunk of junk I've been beating into existence this whole time!  

I am very VERY happy with the results of the test.  And it seems that for everyone who were neutral about ref's graphics and my animation, there were multitudes more that adored it.  Same goes for Juan's masterful music, and even my crappy programming!  Honestly the part that I'm most proud of is the reception that the tutorial got.  It has been very positively received by everyone who played and that took months to get right!

However, despite the kind words, there was a lot of valuable feedback in the game, much of which I will be addressing next week! There is a lot of work still to do, but I feel remotivated to press on, knowing now that there's at least some people out there that feel like I'm on the right track.

Next Week

This upcoming week, Ref will be working on the 4th level's tile map because I want to have them all at least mocked up before we start making enemies.  It takes time and iteration to get the levels just right, and having a general space populated from the get go will give us more time to examine it and decide what to improve.  

From my end I will be working on implementing the tile maps and going through the feedback from the playtest.  The most important things that people rightly called out is the game's need for novel events.  As one user put it, "repetition is what kills these games, you need to have something new to spice up each run." I've already started to take that advice, and inserting new random events that could occur on any level.  I think it will give people more goals to chase as they play and spice up the fourth or fifth run by promising that they will not know what they'll find!