Hi,
It's been over a month since I ran the Beta for my horror adventure game Dark Lessons, so I thought I'd give you a roundup of how it went.
At the risk of repeating myself, let me start by giving my heartfelt thanks to everyone who participated in the Beta! Without exception, you've been gracious, encouraging and, when things didn't work as expected, patient and polite. I don't take this for granted. While there was a fair share of critical feedback, too, the only issue I've got with that is that I tend to agree with most of it — which means there's more work ahead. 😵💫
The Numbers
35 people played the Beta, and 18 of you sent me written feedback via my form. In addition, I got to watch 7 people play live while sitting next to them and taking notes like a mad scientist watching their victims subjects.
First, the good news: Everyone who submitted feedback would recommend Dark Lessons to a friend, though I feel like you (yes, you!) were being a bit polite. I'll also say that one of the people who gave a score of 10 wrote that he did so because I'm his brother, so maybe I shouldn't include family in the score next time ...
Good news is boring though. Off to a brutally-honest look at the things I still need to work on:
Performance
Some of you experienced serious performance issues. I previously thought I'd done a lot of optimization. Alas, what a fool I was! I took another deep dive and found that the game handled materials very poorly. After removing redundant textures, Dark Lessons now needs 30 % less disk space and VRAM. Another performance boost resulted from switching from Godot Engine's default physics engine to Jolt. Some of you have retested an updated version and reported notably smoother gameplay. So: Yay!
Where's the fear factor?
Interestingly, even though everyone said they'd recommend the game to a friend, a majority of players didn't find it scary enough. This also matches my observation during live playtests that players who weren't really into horror tended to enjoy the game more for what it was than horror buffs.
I'm glad people still enjoyed their experience, and part of this discrepancy may be due to my vision of the game having shifted somewhat from a classic horror walking simulator to more of a plot-driven Lovecraftian adventure. However, it makes me wonder whether I'm addressing my audience the right way. I'm now thinking about additional ways of making the game scarier and creating more tension.
Duration
Similarly, most of you found that there wasn't enough content for a demo release yet. This is a tricky one for me. My goal for the demo is to offer around 30 minutes of play time, and some of you, perhaps getting a bit stuck or just taking their time to take everything in, actually reported playing that long. Most players took just around 20 minutes, which I agree can feel too short. There was also one player who "beat" the demo in slightly more than 10 minutes, and they were understandably disappointed. I'm already working on adding more content, not just in order to lengthen the experience, but also to round it out — e.g. by showing you the dog eating his food and what happens next.
Some of you even volunteered cool ideas for additional content and easter eggs, and I'm thinking about which of those to implement and how best to go about it.
Controls
By far the area that most players said still needs improvement are the controls. In particular, many of you didn't like the mouse speed and/or camera weight, or the degree to which the player's head tilts when walking left or right. I've been planning to adapt the default setting and add more customization options. Some players asked for controller support, which is also planned.
A few of you asked for control options that are actually already in the game, like deactivating the head bob. This one has me wondering how best to make players aware of the available options, but that should be a solvable problem.
What about all the rest?
The above topics are the ones where a clear majority of players agreed. I got a lot of feedback on all sorts of other aspects of the game, both positive and negative. One very divisive example is the grain and aberration graphics filter. People either hated or loved that one, so I'm planning to give players the option to choose their preferred graphics style right at the start of the game. A lot of players also missed options to control music, voice and sound effects separately, and I'll definitely add those.
Many other topics didn't get enough mentions to show a clear trend, but rest assured that I'm taking every single piece of feedback into consideration as I'm going forward.
Conclusion
Overall, I'm happy with how the Beta played out. There's also a pang of regret mixed in, though: Quite a few of your suggestions were things I had planned to add or improve anyway but ended up not having enough time to do so before the Beta started. I plan events like these months in advance in order to sync them with marketing beats, and I tend to be overly optimistic about how much I'll get done in the remaining time. I hope the good news is that a lot of the things you've been asking for, particularly improved controls and settings, will definitely make it into the finished game.
What's Next?
The Beta went better than I had hoped in some ways, but in other ways, it became clear that I've still got a lot of work to do. I want to take your feedback seriously and take the time to really polish up Dark Lessons before releasing a demo. I'd originally aimed at Christmas for the demo, but now I believe next spring will be more realistic if I don't want to release something that feels rushed.
Some improvements are already in the game. Performance got a bit of a boost, and I refined the graphics options and added presets that are automatically applied based on your hardware setup. Others, I'm working on right now. I've been adding a new puzzle as well as planning a few more creeps and quality-of-life features. Depending on how much time I'll have left, a hint system might also be on the table.
That's it for the Beta roundup! In the next newsletter, I'll present some of the added content, hopefully without adding spoilers.
Catch up with you soon! In the meantime, if you haven't done so yet, the best way to support me is always to wishlist Dark Lessons on Steam. It really makes a difference!