What's up gamers, it's been a while!
As you may remember these updates are coming out quarterly from now on so I can focus more of my time on larger chunks of the game.
Our headline act for this update is World 1 which is now fully complete and has now been set aside for some late-development-polish, hooray!
At a glance...
9 of Windswept's 60 stages reside in World 1 and consist mostly of soft-tutorials introducing different mechanics, 1 boss fight and an unlockable extra stage you'll need to beat in order to reach the post-game challenges.
We also introduce Bluppo and Hue with their own dedicated stages!
Tester Feedback
At the start of March our beta backers received their steam keys and were dropped in an empty room full of warps, each one leading to a stage with no additional context.
Everybody testing has been super supportive and understanding - I opened up a special testing channel in our discord server and a google feedback form as an alternative communication method and both were utilised to great success!
An overlooked part of the development process from a player's perspective is that I need virtually every aspect of the game to be playable in a way that doesn't lead to crashes. Anything that isn't ready for player-interaction needs to be strategically cut out or hastily "fixed up" - It's a time sink and a little bit messy but it keeps attention focused on parts of the game that matter for the test, at the expense of there being the odd crash here and there.
Most issues during this initial test were caused by speedrunners activating the game timer or people activating multiplayer mode, I had ran out of time in the lead-up to the beta and all of the "extra" features found in the options hadn't been tested for a few months, that's the nature of being the project manager, stage designer and programmer -- too many hats, too little time...
Dev Responsiveness
These betas serve as mini "practice releases", to improve my ability to anticipate, prevent and resolve gameplay issues promptly.
Virtually all critical issues were resolved within the first couple of days and the minor issues remaining have been carried over to be fixed in time for the next beta release.
When the official full release deadline rolls around I'll hopefully have a few more hands on deck to help me - our publisher will be porting Windswept to different consoles so there should be more eyes available to notice more things! But until then it's just me and sometimes I'll just miss things.
So... What's next?
World 2, obviously!
At the time of this post we're wrapping up World 2's development schedule which I hope will be ready for an early June release to our testers.
10 stages are in the works this time around -- 8 regular, 1 boss, 1 unlockable extra.
But that's about all I have to share for now. These quarterly updates probably feel a bit light on info compared to the previous update format, and that's fair. They're more like a vibe check so you can see how development is progressing.
Is there any info you'd like to see in these updates?
Is there anything you've been curious about?
Leave a comment and let me know!
Thanks for reading, see you next time~