Hi hello and welcome to another Mik devlog! A lot has happened since the last one, like Mik hitting 2600 wishlists and of course the public playtest.
These were probably the most successful months of the game... ever - both in terms of wishlists and improvement of the game itself.
I got a lot of feedback and bug reports both on the public and closed playtest so most of the past 2 months were spent on preparing for the playtest release and polishing the game after that.
Playable Release
Like I said above - the game is now fully playable (yay), meaning that all the systems and areas I developed over the past months have finally come together, which feels very satisfying.
The playtest is available for everyone to play, just go to the Steam page of the game and click on "Play Now" and you will receive access.
Along with that there is also a completely overhauled Steam page and new trailer (which wasn't that good ngl)!
Lore
While preparing for the public playtest release I also finalised the important aspects of the lore and implemented them in the game through the computer logs and notes. There have already been some changes and extensions to the lore through new secrets and whatnot but it's still lackluster. Especially the lore on the computers can often be "useless" to the greater picture and boring to read.
There will definitely be a lore rework before the demo release where I'll somewhat "linearise" the lore experience so that you can experience the story without reading through every log (tl;dr - the logs should be additional lore, not always the main source).
Movement
This is the thing that probably changed the most during these 2 months. Even during the closed playtesting the movement was the most frustrating thing about the game - by far. Luckily I fixed it (to some extent) for the public release but those who played probably know that it was still lackluster (to put it lightly). A few days ago there was another large update for it which should be an improvement. Tho it's still a work in progress so there will definitely be more changes to come.
Along with that I also added dashing and wallrunning (which will be introduced in the next levels) as well as vaulting which has been added in the latest update!
Leaderboards
I was planning to only add this later in development but I decided to implement it sooner because to give players actually something to do in the game and push retention
(ignore the 0 second entry there were a few.... bugs)
Polish, Bugfixes, Optimisation bla bla bla
I'm getting LAZY to write more so here is just a short rundown of some smaller new things that have been added
- Discord integration
- Steam achievements
- Subtitles
- Full localisation
- Started working on full settings menu
- Breakable glass
- Prettier computers
- Polish interactions with computers (they glitch if you hit them too hard)
- Level selector
- Lots of secrets!!!
- optional upscaling for the AI slop enjoyers
Here are 2 cool screenshots of some new secrets:
There was also a lot of optimisation work which helped lower the performance requirements again
What's Coming...
The big goal is to get the next 2 levels and collectibles so I can release a full demo. I already started working on the second level:
Besides that there will of course be more polish and bugfix updates, but development might slow down over the next few weeks because I'll be busy with irl stuff.
If you want to give feedback on the playtest please do so either on my Discord or the feedback form
(completing this will give you a super special role in the Discord)
Thanks for reading
- Stefaaan !!