Posted January 06, 2025 by Ankiano
#playtest-demo #demo #update #interscape
Hi everyone! Ankiano back here with an update on Interscape's development progress.
These first couple of weeks after the publication of the playtesting demo have been marked by the feedback some of you have shared with us. If you haven't seen it yet, here's the link to our Itch page, where you can download the Playtest Demo or play it on the browser.
First of all, we'd like to thank everyone for their support! We got tons of useful feedback to work with, and we'd like to share our progress with addressing it starting with the two new patches that were released (in rather fast succession) after publication:
Some of the feedback we got about the initial release was about the difficulty level, particularly of the Pantry Route (Sorrow response in the roulette event). Players were often struggling with the amount of enemies there and particularly with this guy:
He goes by the name of Wine Shooter. Yeah, I know right, sooo original. Anyways, his whole deal is that, as soon as he spots the player, he will chase him and aim towards him to shoot fragments of broken glass. They were quite tough for most players to begin with: they would move too fast, shoot too often, and deal a ton of damage. On top of that, they spawned quite regularly in areas like the Kitchen or Pantry. So we adjusted their difficulty slightly and have gotten good feedback since. We also made sure to adjust the number of enemies in small spaces.
Another important update: the charged attack ability now deals more damage but takes longer to activate by consecutively damaging enemies based on their weaknesses.
Here's another aspect where your feedback contributed a lot: guidance and accessibility. One of the things we did is we added a few new prompts in menus where the action button wasn't that clear, e.g., Enter in the Save / Load Menu:
Finally, there were also some updates that improved performance or solved occasional crashes reported by users.
Now that the first major feedback "session" is over, we want to shift our attention a little bit away from the playtest demo's potential improvements and focus on the bigger picture. While many of you have enjoyed this first build, we have also got some useful constructive criticism about things we can do better, which can be mostly grouped into two categories: artistic direction and game feel.
We will be focusing on the latter first: making smoother animations, transitions, new and improved / smarter enemies, and generally polishing the experience of the core gameplay look - the game juice. The base is there and it's solid, but now we should polish the experience and focus on what is fun for you, the player.
We're hoping to post the next update before the end of the month. Hope you'll be tuned in for the next one!