Hey everyone, It’s the Critter Cove dev team, Gentlemen Rat here - we’ve managed to distract Pokee, Sammi and Anchor long enough to write our own dev log! We’ve also got a new exciting feature to talk about: tourism, but more on that below, along with a competition to win a copy of the game!
Lessons from the playtest
We’ve had a lot of fun watching the hundreds of videos and streams our community has made. It’s gratifying to see so many people playing the game for the first time, so we’d like to thank you very much for participating!
CakeJumper getting a piece of Pokee's mind
The playtest has been incredible in helping us learn what people love - and didn’t love - about the game. There are a few things we’ve picked up from talking to players, reading posts here and on Discord and also just watching how people play that are going to shape the game moving forward. We noticed a lot of things that people loved about the game, from spending an hour in the character creator making the perfect avatar to exploring the underwater depths and our open world, which we feel is a huge asset and unique part of the game. We’ve also looked at places where we think we can make lots of improvements. Greater Motivation: The playtest didn’t have our opening “shipwreck” cutscene, but even if we did, we’re not sure we’ve given players enough understanding of why they are hanging out in Critter Cove. The early game experience is a lot of characters randomly giving you a bunch of requests to clean up the town or fix buildings giving you a house, and suddenly an hour later you’re building this whole workshop. Sure, you might just want to gather the resources to stop Sammi from living in a tent his whole life but a bigger picture reason for why you’re here is missing from the early game.
Please, somebody get this cat a house!
We’ve noticed players having a lack of a clear long-term goal leads to the game feeling either too open (in terms of the world itself) or too prescribed (simply following a checklist of quests exactly without any organic exploration). This has been a particular challenge for a limited playtest as the game does open up in mid-game. A clearer “core loop”: There’s a single main thing that you do that everything else feeds into. This is usually called the “core loop”. In a lot of games that we’ve taken inspiration from, this core loop often involves farming. There’s a lot to do in Critter Cove, like exploring, fishing, farming or crafting, but in the playtest everything can feel very separate. In the mid-game, the climb to new town ranks is the closest we come to the main objective of the game, but this doesn’t become clear until a few hours in. Even when it is clear, most of the town rank objectives are about finding a certain unique item or resource in the world, so they tie into exploration heavily but other systems - like personalisation - don’t touch them at all. Tone - We’ve been enjoying watching people interact with the townsfolk, and we’ve noted that people especially love our more onerous and irritable initial resident Pokee and the way she interacts with players. We certainly don’t want every character to act like Pokee - even Pokee herself wouldn’t want that - but we do want to show more of the weird and distinctive characters and situations that can happen with the critters as early and often as we can!
What an attitude!