Posted March 26, 2024 by sebasfrdly
As Kalidax nears its end date we've conducted three playtests. We held our heads high when as we were about to do our third playtest, we were sure that our gameplay loop was flawless and complete. We were quickly humbled by the lack of polish within our experience. A lack of polish that could only be discovered by people who are removed from the experience.
Our first blunders came in the form of bugs. When we introduced Gene splicing, just getting the system to work properly was our biggest concern, so when we got it working, it felt bulletproof. Until we tested it and found the following issues:
- You can pick the same alien twice and still get a new alien out of the pod.
- If you try to merge aliens that don't exist, rather than getting nothing, both your aliens get deleted.
- The aliens all appear on top of each other when they spawn and they do not move.
We have a bunch more miscellaneous bugs so here is a list of them in no particular order:
- If a player hatches too many aliens, the aliens appear on the End of Day UI screen.
- On our title screen, the music will shoot up in volume causing the players discomfort.
- When our game reaches game over, the data does not reset, so the game does not reset at all. You can just restart and you'll be placed right where you were before.
Additionally, our game is stuck at a small impasse because we have quite a few things that players are not enjoying about our game that we need to fix:
- We want our players to feel like they are actually losing something in the game so that the game over screen isn't just a hard reset with no context.
- We want to change our level so that we can encourage exploration for our players. There's no visual distinction between zones, so the player feels like they are playing a very repetitive game.
We only have about two weeks to complete this game. I figured we wouldn't have to crunch at all, but I suppose that the most important 80% of the game always comes at the last 20% of time. We're really going to be dedicated to the polish of the game, and we are going to set everything up soon. I wish myself and my team as much luck as possible.