Posted July 10, 2018 by fluffy
I got a nice thorough round of user testing, which is such a great and useful experience! A lot of the feedback was very helpful and I've pushed a new build that makes a bunch of the low-hanging-fruit changes:
Another common complaint was about how the score "doesn't do anything," which is something I've heard from other playtesters in the past. Trust me, scores are there for a reason! I just haven't gotten to implementing it yet; that will be part of final polish for the full album!
I've also had a few people complain about being unable to select a track using the mouse. The main menu is very, very temporary right now and while I hadn't planned on supporting the mouse for the real thing (since the mouse isn't usable anywhere else in the game, by design) it's something I'll consider for the long term.
And, the playtesters had some other meta-UI feedback as well, which was already on my list of things that I'm planning to deal with at a later time. While it's a little annoying that players can't just read my mind about my long-term plans, it's at least validating that what I had in mind is probably a good idea going forward. (The main one was wanting something more unifying to make it feel like the games have anything to do with songs on an album and that the album is a single cohesive unit. This is definitely something I've thought a lot about and is even in my original design documents!)
Anyway, I was really happy to get this feedback and while I haven't had the ability to work on Refactor for a while, this gave me a bit more of a push to want to continue this weird project of mine, so hopefully this gives me the push I needed to get back into it. Because I mean, wow, I haven't actually made a new game since Flight, which was in... January?! Holy hell.