Update

First, I just want to express how excited I am that Next Fest starts today and I've got a working demo that I've seen random internet strangers play. Its a great opportunity for me to see what other people think, and it just feels good to have something "real" that folks are interacting with. That was the goal of this entire experiment, honestly. I can't thank people enough for their help along the way.

The Demo I uploaded for the early press release was a little sparser than I wanted it to be, but I've managed to update it based on watching people play my game. Lets talk a little bit about what I saw.

The first thing I noticed is that people didn't really seem to "get" the rogue-lite/like random world generation that I was doing on each run. This shouldn't be shocking to me - I don't explain it at all. So what I did quickly was add a screen that shows which of the levels your current run will be, before dropping you into level 1-1. This screen could absolutely look better, but for the purposes of the demo, I figured I needed something that explains what's going on.

The next thing I noticed is that when folks DID unlock an item, they never actually went to storage to equip it. This circumvents like 60% of the game play... which is not ideal. So I put some nice flashy green lights on the door and a giant NEW! label that should get people's attention. Again, the art could be better here but I'm just adjusting as quickly as I can to improve the demo experience.

The other thing I added to try to round out the demo experience was the timers for total play time and best run time. This should add a little bit of a speed run motivator for folks who are really enjoying the game. How fast can you actually escape!? My best time currently is 2:57. If anyone beats that let me know and I might kick you a thing or two. Bonus points if its recorded so I can watch how you did it.

Sign Off

That's it for this week. I'm going to be heavily monitoring any feedback I receive for the next few weeks, but largely taking a nice break here.

Thanks again for reading and following along!

Lee