Next Fest was in my eyes a great success. I was hoping to get Velocity Noodle in front of some eyeballs and hopefully get a couple of hundred wishlists. Well, we beat that and are in the thousands! Thank you to everyone who tried the demo!
The game got zero media coverage so the success is all organic. I saw it regularly being on the first page of the platform section so that's really really cool!
I wanted to share the feedback I've gathered and the development focus going forward.
- Biggest improvement needed: Visuals
I knew this already, but got it confirmed. All in-game art is made by me (this is a one-man-band after all) and while my pixel art has improved over the year it's still lacking. Especially when it comes to clarity and overall details. The hard part about this is that focusing too much on polish at this stage risks creating content that will be wasted when levels get reworked or even scrapped.
With that said I will either have to do another pass of all sprites or get external help.
- Smoothening out gameplay details
For the most part, people enjoyed the gameplay which is awesome. The movement seems to work for most which mean the core loop of the game is good, which is the most important. There's some work needed for edge cases and general smoothness to make the player feel good all the time. These are small cheats the game does to make the player feel good, e.g. letting you jump when you are right off the edge etc. A lot of these hacks are in the game but need to be tweaked.
- Level difficulty
Oh boy.. this is a big one. For the demo, I had to scale down from 40 to 30 to 25 levels. Which in the end meant switching order and removing levels that were supposed to either teach you something or scale it up. I think the end result ended up being way too rough and the difficulty smacks you in the face. The game got a lot of unique players but u can see playtime being low, partly because it's a demo but partly because it ramps up too quickly. I'm leaning towards scrapping most levels and just restarting. A lot of the levels are from the start of the development and it shows.
- Encouraging speed
The game is all about going fast and thus has some different moves. I have tried various things to nudge the player to go fast but nothing has stuck yet. I've tried medals, score, HP damage etc but now I think I've figured it out. By combining moves (e.g. dash jump -> slide) you will get a temporary speed boost, which makes novice players be able to progress and advanced players able to break the game if they want.
Thanks for reading, you can follow more detailed development updates on my Twitter https://twitter.com/velocitynoodle and https://twitter.com/Shotgunanaconda.
Feel free to reach out with feedback anytime!