As we continue with areas that we are actively looking to improve in the future. There will always be places where we can do better, both working together as a studio, and each person that is a part of this experience. We fail as a studio when we can't identify where we failed.
Ongoing Bugs
Nobody likes bugs, least of all the developers of your favorite games. As games get more complex, bugs will express themselves in new and "exciting" ways, and the team is always looking to resolve them. We've had a few rare bugs that continue to elude us, particularly a rare turn bug, and it's been a tough one to crack.
For the non-coder type, most of the code of a game tends to interact in some way with everything else. Making changes that may seem benign will suddenly break another system. While some fixed can be straightforward with some elbow grease and focus, others are a lot more complicated, and we've built a stronger QA and unit testing process for future projects to help us identify and resolve issues early.
Game Presentation
Consistent feedback we received from the community focused on a lack of user feedback within Emberlight. Whether this was confusion within initial menus, or a lack of direction with something as important as navigating the rooms on a level, we needed to do a better job at conveying information to our community. Efforts such as tutorials we're not enough to properly ease players into the game.
As a team, we have a major focus in the current project to ensure the user feedback is properly designed out at the start. We can't assume that a new player will simply get it, and therefore the game needs to provide appropriate direction for a player that needs it. At the same time, we cannot force a player down a lengthy tutorial, so it's a balancing act that we'll refine with the demo we're working on.
Game Awareness
While this isn't directly related to the game development itself, getting awareness for future games is crucial to build our community and push us to continue building quality games for everyone. This was a learning experience for us, and we have new tools in the tool belt for our future projects. Particularly both how to get the game in front of more people, and to ensure that our presentation properly represents the game.
We had many great reviewers, streamers, and YouTubers play our game and provide feedback on it, and it was a humbling experience to hear everyone's views on Emberlight. From the reviews we received, we averaged around a 7 out of 10 which is average to us. Nothing less than a 10 out of 10 is good enough, and we have a blueprint on how to achieve that goal.
If you have purchased the game, please leave a review so the Steam algorithm can index our game properly.
Our final article will focus on our next project. We're super excited to finally unveil our recent work, and where we're going in 2020. Stay tuned!
Read the first article here.