Hello,
The current playtest will come to an end on Sunday evening, and I thought it would be interesting to give you an update on how it's going and what players are saying.
First of all, from a quantitative point of view alone, it's much better than the first one!
Almost twice as many players tested Mémoriapolis as in the previous playtest. More players, more feedback, and a much higher average playing time.
In short, the team is very happy with this session!
Very happy, but focused on what remains to be done.
The feedback can be divided into three main categories: crashes, zoom and new fields.
CRASHES
There are still a lot of them.
We are fully aware of this and the team will be concentrating on correcting them over the coming months. Some have already been corrected on our internal version, while others will be more complicated to remove. We know that this is a major challenge if we want to build a community around the game, and enable players to trust us with future developments.
THE FIELDS
The proposal not to be able to destroy them was based on our desire to confront players with their choices. Especially as they could become neighbourhoods once the farm had been destroyed.
But it didn't work. ːsteamsadː
The team is currently testing a version with fields that can easily be destroyed according to the town's organisational needs. This has forced us to remove the possibility of fields becoming neighbourhoods initially. This option may come back later.
[When and how much will it cost to destroy a field?
THE ZOOM
I think this is by far the biggest demand: to be able to lower the camera.
What you have to understand is that the buildings that players put up are modelled by a talented person who has done some very fine work that could really do with being seen more closely. The houses, on the other hand, are procedurally generated and their 3D models are much more basic.
To meet this demand, we need to greatly improve these models, which is not impossible, but costly in terms of time and resources.
Once again, the person in charge of shaders is working on this, and we hope to be able to meet your expectations for the next version of the playtest, which should arrive at the end of April.
Improved 3D models + objects on roofs and facades.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the players for the quality of their feedback and the kindness they've shown in their messages.
Even the most critical ones were always accompanied by a message of encouragement and that's invaluable for the whole team. So a big thank you to you all! ːsteamthumbsupː