Hi everyone, wanted to give a bit of update regarding the status of the game. Having participated in both the Dinos vs Robots event and Spring Sale, and having the game be played by notable youtubers, we have enough data that showed us how things are and we would like to share with you our plans moving forward, so lets get started.
Onwards
Based on the feedback and data we received across these events and coverage, its clear that the core gameplay loop works, however, the visuals and presentation needs a lot of work, the scale is too small, and combat (animation) needs polish and more variety to make it less repetitive.
Because of this, we'd like to shift our focus from development to do RND (experiments) to try and find the best way possible to improve the game and bring a meaningful experience for players.
Experiments
In general we will do RND in 2 key areas, Gameplay / Design and Art / Visuals. We feel that having these 2 areas well established is crucial in order to improve the quality of the game. Doing RND means we will be working with smaller samples or portions of the game, so we’ll keep you guys posted when we’ve made interesting breakthroughs.
Art
As of now, there doesn't seem to be much complaint on this department, however, based on the data we received, its clear that the visuals aren't captivating enough.
Now, we're not going to do a complete 180 and rework the art to look like something its not, our goal with this RND is to find the best way possible to establish a visual theme that enhances the current look of the game and bring everything together in a unified manner.
In other words, we wanted to see where and how far we can take the game’s visuals to make it look more appealing and captivating.
Gameplay
Based on feedback its clear that one of the lowest points of the game is its content and that it severely needs more of it.
This might seem straightforward on the surface and that the usual approach of “Add more dinosaurs and environments” might seem to be the solution, however if we dig a bit deeper, this solution may be counter productive as content alone may not be enough if the content doesn’t bring value (depth) to the game. We feel that so many dinosaur games fall into this trap (was guilty of this too) in thinking that by having a lot of dinosaurs and areas the game will automatically be better.
Although there's some truth to this as more variety does help create interest, but if variety is the only thing we're relying on the game is going to fall flat very quickly. Having variety without substance is meaningless, the addition of new content should improve the overall experience, not to simply just be eye candy. In other words, Just because there's a lot of things in the game doesn't mean there's a lot of things to do, and even if there's a lot of things to do, those things may not even be interesting enough for the player to do them.
At the same time, we do realize that a game may very well be content deficient (currently where the game stands based on user feedback), and that the addition of any content is enough to improve player experience.
This is why we decided to step back a bit and ask, what is the best way for us to do to bring value to the game in order to significantly improve player experience, while at the same time taking into account the capabilities, limitations, and expectations that we have for the game.
This is a balancing act that we’re quite interested in and we are excited to push ourselves further to try and overcome these challenges in the months ahead.
That’s currently it for this devlog and more updates coming soon!