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Hey folks, Kaye here to give you another exciting update!
As some of you may have heard, we had a playtesting session recently (well, a couple of weeks ago now), which was very insightful!
During the session we were primarily looking at areas in which the player may get confused or lost, be it within the level itself or the UI, it was also worth noting how long it took our lovely volunteers to play through it all.
Fortunately nobody got so frustrated at playing that they felt the need to throw office furniture around the room, so I'm calling this one a success!
Overall though, the results were very interesting. Naturally there were a few lost souls, unsure of where they were or where they were going, but eventually they found their way.
There was a key issue with the interface when connecting the nodes which resulted in the players being unsure if what they were doing was correct or not, even when they were. We've had many discussions at great length on how to solve this issue and help to clarify to people when they have correctly joined two nodes. This seems to be an ongoing problem for some time, for now we're experimenting with different visual effects, like indents or outlines, but these may just be temporary fixes until we work out a more elegant solution.
The most apparent bug fixes were that of the level layout, which is what we've been tidying up for the last two weeks. Ripping apart whole sections of levels and rebuilding them to help clarify areas, and to stop cheeky players being able to get into areas they shouldn't and getting stuck!
As some of the puzzles weren't immediately clear in their solution some players would attempt to solve the following puzzle. This led to further confusion. In order to avoid this happening we've established a rule of making only one editable red block to be seen at any one time when possible.
And finally we've been working on adding more lighting to areas which were severely under lit.
Well that's the abridged version of our playtesting results!
In other news, we got shiny new business cards!
You fine folks can see these business cards in person this week if you're around Edinburgh on Thursday and Friday, as myself and Robin will be representing Space Budgie at the "Games are for Everyone" event at the Mash House on Friday staring at 7pm as well as the "Scottish Design Summit 2015" on Thursday from 9am at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. It's gonna be an exciting couple of days and we'd sure love to see you there! And we'll be bringing along a version of 2.0 to play too! :)
Keep and eye out for the next exciting update!
Over and out! - Kaye