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komehara37 days ago

That healing shrine wasn’t intended to be reachable before getting the edge grab

Ah, I had that feeling I was doing an exploit doing that wall jump with a ledge getting in my way, but since it was a heal point it looked like I was supposed to be able to reach it (at first I didn’t know it though, I just saw a sword looking like Excalibur and thought it was a new, important skill to learn).

Actually sometimes I ask devs for a debug build specifically to try more things like unlocking all skills and warp directly into boss rooms so I can test them and give more feedback without giving up on the way. In fact, I should have probably unlocked cheat keys in our build since it’s a playground anyway.

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Ellaris37 days ago

Debug commands can be useful, but people can also give up too early and just use them without experiencing the game, it makes it faster to test but also can pollute the feedback, if you use cheats you don't know how hard it is to get the unlocks. 
Like if I mentioned that I moved the teleport cheat from "t" to f12, I might have gotten different feedback, but would it be higher quality?

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komehara32 days ago

Hm that’s something to take into account when playtesting prototypes indeed.

I think it’s okay if the cheat is just temporarily here to replace a feature that’s missing, like checkpoints. I suppose that in this case the cheat would be to directly face bosses in a “boss rush” manner, so as long as players use it after dying many times and feeling they will be better at boss fight that platforming between levels (and dying due to stupid mistakes because they’re in a hurry because they have to redo the same paths due to the absence of checkpoints), and just giving feedback on the bosses, it would make sense.

If the players learn a lot from platforming and minions (such as the good timing for wall jump) it wouldn’t give the expected boss experience indeed. But I was more thinking of this as a patch to replace unimplemented checkpoints, for players who have reached them already but just happened to die and restart from zero, and not learning anything new on their way to the checkpoint. If players use the cheat just to cheat, that’s another issue, but between game devs I think it’s okay to trust them on this kind of thing (but have them write down clearly if they used it or not).

Fun fact, I just told another dev team not to upload a debug build made in Unreal because it was so huge. Well, cheat keys may be enabled in Release build too so that’s not an issue.

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