Original post: http://quickfire-games.com/weekly-digest-may-4-11-2/
Dear all!
Apologies for the late weekly update. Since we were unable to put anything out last week, we’ve decided to bundle last week and this week’s updates, so there’s a lot to cover!
Let’s start out with the most important part:
QA & Controls
We’re well aware that our first two releases were somewhat disastrous with many users experiencing a wide range of bugs. While Early Access is partly to help with this, we did not intend for it to be so widespread since we’re hoping for more input on the design.. So with that note, I’d like to introduce two new members of our team!
Our last line of defense, meet the QA Team; Hannah Palabay and William Dionio!
We have brought them on board with the sole purpose of providing a more thorough QA run through as builds come out.
The other major change is we’ve decided to change our release schedule to monthly instead of every two weeks. This gives the development team more time to entertain QA feedback and will hopefully result in more stable builds. The team will be split between feature development and polishing/bug crushing, meaning each update will have both new content and lots of fixes.
Regarding controls, we’ve been working hard at trying to improve controls and have absorbed a lot of feedback, as well as watched video playthroughs for more ideas. Here are the proposed changes (you can actually try these out by going into Options when you start the game and rebinding the keys)
E – Action Button / Pickup / Throw
F – Use tool / Eat
TAB – Switch Menus (Left/Right)
L + Crl – Switch Menus (Up/Down)
We’re also adding full mouse support to all the menus, including back & close buttons to improve mouse navigation (Yay!).
We are also playing around with a few other ideas but I’ll save those for when they’re more concrete and when the development team tells us that they are doable.
So please keep sending us control feedback, especially for the keyboard.
Bangkok
The last two weeks have also been extremely hectic as the senior team went off to Bangkok to attend Unite. As mentioned in our last update, Unite is a conference held by Unity, the makers of the engine we’re using.
We have attended lots of talks, but most importantly, we got to sit in a code review with some of the senior engineers. All in all, the trip was highly educational, and expect to see the learnings gathered applied to the game over the coming weeks.
Particularly, as we gear up for a code overhaul & Unity 5 Upgrade which will bring with it many performance enhancements (we hope) and resolve many of the ongoing bugs.
After Unite, the team returned to Manila. During our time there, we discovered that a digital content festival is happening with Bangkok Toycon, Comicon, AFA Thailand & the Thai Comicon all happening simultaneously! Our CEO, Sharan & Producer, Gwen decided to go back to explore and network. It was a fantastic trip as well. We were able to learn a lot about the Thai market and cemented our decision to localise the game in Thai (you may have noticed, some of our posts are now also available in Thai!).
During our time there, we were able to make many connections, promote Wild Season and also find some interesting suppliers! We’re hoping through them, we’ll be able to provide merchandising options soon! (once we sort out logistics!)
And that’s been our last two weeks at Quickfire Games!
Tune in next week for more!