Posted January 05, 2022 by Midnight Spire Games
I recently finished implementing the first real dungeon (following the tutorial zone), and I spent a few days playtesting it. I don't want to put too fine a point on playtesting at this stage, but I also wanted to make sure that my general approach was on track before I continued making content. Basically, I wasn't just testing combat balance, but skill configuration, dungeon design, game flow, stat formulas, and so on. I played through the first dungeon (three floors) twice - once with the current default party, and once with a party of the other five aspects (classes).
This ended up being really valuable. I made a ton of adjustments based on these sessions, but there were a few main takeaways:
Besides that, I have mostly been checking off lots of smaller features and quality of life improvements – things I haven't gotten around to until now. One thing in particular that I have been consistently dissatisfied with was the environment visuals – the textures, the colors, and the dithered “torchlight” sight radius. I finally managed to tweak these things to where I'm reasonably happy with them, at least for this dungeon. Here's the entrance to the first labyrinth, the hospital:
I've never written pre-release dev logs before, so if you're interested in this project, let me know what you'd like to hear about.