Hi everyone,
I want to take this post to talk a little bit about the importance of player feedback on this project, and give you two examples of why bug-hunting is difficult to do just by myself.
My first example is that of the broken strategy map. I had repeatedly gotten reports (mostly from John), that the strategy map can’t be interacted with after some time of playing the game. My own tests of this were never able to replicate it. Any time I tried to use the map it would work - placing various combinations of buildings didn’t change that, letting the game run for hours didn’t change that, and hiring different combinations of units also had no impact. Finally, one of the players of the game managed to not only report the bug, but was able to tell exactly what was wrong: Trying to use the strategy map while having your tool out meant that the game would simply ignore any clicks on the strategy map, while interacting with it without the tool meant that it would work without a problem.
The main issue here was how I interact with the game. Whenever I play, I always put the tool away unless I am specifically trying to use it. John, on the other hand, keeps the tool out for the most part - in case he needs to cut something down. This leads to the larger issue at hand: The game has multiple “pillars” of gameplay, and there are many different ways for how to play it. Some players will focus more on the FPS aspect of the game - others on the RTS or the base building side. If I am the only person looking for bugs, I will find and eliminate all bugs that are created by my specific playstyle - while missing many, many others. Getting feedback from other players is therefore incredibly important in helping me figure out not only what bugs I need to fix, but also what quality of life improvements are needed to improve the experience for others.
Let me give you another example here: When we first changed the progression of the game to require outposts, John’s outposts would always take much longer to build than mine - and destroy his logistics much more than mine. For weeks, I couldn't figure out what the problem was, until I finally watched him play and saw the problem: Whenever John would place a building blueprint, he would cut down the closest tree, and add the wood to the construction inventory. Let’s say that the building needed 50 wood to be completed - John had now added 10 wood, which meant that the construction worker who came to drop off the 50 wood dropped off only 40, then brought the remaining 10 wood back to the main base - before returning to construct the building. Meanwhile, my own worker would drop off 50 wood, and start constructing straight away.
Again, this difference meant that I was struggling much less than him, and that the construction workers needed an adjustment to finishing the construction before dropping off the excess wood (something that is on my to-do list).
Overall, I want to say that I am very grateful for all of the feedback that I have received over the past months (including on the tutorial), and that I am continuously learning more about how people interact with the game.
Until next week!