NOVEMBER UPDATE:
We have been doing a lot of play testing lately, with mixed but overall positive results. We have already implemented many of the suggestions we received, with improvements in particular to:
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handling of the two characters, in particular the movement. Being an isometric game that does not have a point-and-click movement system, the play testers had a bit of difficulty adjusting to the perspective, but we were happy to find out that this adjustment took only a few minutes.
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UI and overall user experience improvements. Many UI elements and game mechanics that were obvious to us turned out to be really confusing to the play testers. It is very normal during user testing to find out these differences in expectations between creators and users, so we were not too surprised.
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level design. Turns out that the learning curve was a bit too steep, so we had to slightly tune the difficulty down and help the players more throughout the level.
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gameplay. The biggest challenge we have right now is to significantly change our main game mechanic, the Threat Level. The TL in our game replaces a traditional health bar. As the TL increases, the environment changes (door close, enemies chase you). The higher the TL, the close you are to the game over. Turns out it is a super confusing mechanic and we have to redesign it.
We will continue with some more play tests in the upcoming weeks, and then we will publish a small demo here on itch.io as well to hear what everyone thinks of the game 😊. Or, if you want to be part of the early play testing sessions of System Under Surveillance, then you can use this form on our site.