Happy Groundhog Day! We hope everyone had a good start off to the year!
March Beta Update
To start off, the March Beta Update is going well! This past month we added all of the cutscene content, some battle system improvements, and some more preparatory work for the Summer Beta Update.
What’s left is to add the big debate battle for the release, fix up a number of bugs, and perhaps balance some things here and there.
Battle System Improvements
We’ll be showing this off more during the month, but we’ve begun to take some of the feedback and feature requests we received about the demo and add them to the game. One such improvement is the addition of level indicators.
Over the game’s development we’ve bounced back and forth between having the indicators or not. On one hand, it can really clog up the screen with information, on the other hand, it’s important for people to be able to gauge their party against their enemies.
We had them visible in the old demo, but removed them from this newest one to see if they really were necessary. Outcome: Definitely necessary.
We watched a number of people play through the game and noticed that without them players:
- Could not gauge if they were in a high level area or not
- Often attacked higher level enemies and died (reducing enjoyment of the game)
- Overlevelled/grinded a lot “to be safe”
- Didn’t level enough for encounters
- Ran away from weak enemies “just in case”
Part of this problem comes from our design decision to have enemy “types” that have different levels (ex. Pokemon) than enemies that only exist at certain levels (ex. Persona). We are also avoiding having colors imply the strength of an enemy (ex. Red slimes versus blue slimes). So we decided to add them back into the game.
What’s Next?
We will be working to tighten up the March beta, and begin to think about the content for the Summer Beta.
Have a great February and look forward to the next beta update!
January 2020 Progress Update