Prehistorians! Hello!
It has now passed a week since we launched the Clawed demo and it has been a whirlwind. In the post, we discuss what has been learned, what comes next and how the demo is slightly misleading (cue dramatic audio)
The first and most important thing to address is all of you - the community. Your feedback has been invaluable. During this week, we have release 3 updates to the demo v0.15, v0.16, and v0.17.
Each of these updates contained changes based on Player feedback. Here are just some of the changes that were driven by all of you:
-the flashlight system was reworked to be head mounted and became far more useful
-Lighting levels we raised slightly in the global illumination system and additional in-game lights were added to dark areas to assist with navigation
-Audio levels were adjusted. Dinosaur audio was increased (we still have work to do on the Audio department, we are aware:))
-Health and Oxygen we added to the HUD, but still with our minimalist theme
-Map Items were added to the game and can be found at Information Booths in the different areas. (We will monitor feedback on this)
-Item Glow was added to help assist progression and with locating items in the world.
What we learned:
While there is still feedback, we are addressing (looking at you auto-save) we thought it would be a good time to share some of our learnings from the past week and discuss what we are planning for the road ahead.
One point that became clear is that our Minimalist approach was a little too strong. From keeping health and oxygen off the HUD, to the lack of clear indicators on items needed to progress. The strive for immersion hurt the experience a little bit. So, hopefully, without the cost of immersion, the updates we've released (particularly yesterday's update with item glow and park maps) have helped towards making goals and objectives clearer. Now, we are not done with this. We know we need to make your overall goal clearer, and we will come back to this in a bit.
Another point we need to address is Audio. Improvements to ambient audio, dinosaur cues to help identify where a predator is coming from and other sounds to help improve immersion - all of this is being worked on and is on the way.
The last main point I'll note is dino AI- You guys want better attacks, more ways to interact with the dinos and overall, some of the kinks (like brief pauses before attacking) to be cleaned up. And we are actively working on this too.
There are a lot of things we have learned from you, our community, over the past week.
It's been pretty awesome to have so many people write us with constructive feedback that really care about the game and how it turns out. And hopefully you can see that we care too, and we will act on that your feedback.
Most of this game is yet to be revealed and we are using this demo as a test ground to ensure that navigating the park is fun, interacting with the dinos is a thrill and exploration is addictive. With feedback like yours, we can do that.
Now, that brings me to some fun stuff - The future. This stuff is further down the line but is coming.
A First-Person Camera Option
Out of all requested features we heard this week, this is probably the most requested. So, we are doing it.
The goal is to have a toggle button where you can switch between first and third person during gameplay.
Now, this is going to take a little bit of time to get done as we want to do it right - and honestly, we are still working on improving the third person animations.
But if you asked for it, please know it is now in the works :)
Crouching
This one we have already mentioned and is coming a little sooner. But yes, crouching is being added.
Quest Management and Objective Screen We won't go too in depth here as we are keeping some things still secret but yes, your goals in the park are going to be added to a quest screen next to your inventory. We'll come back to this.
Dino Interactions This one ties into some of the stuff we have not discussed yet, but just know, that there will be other ways to interacted with dinos than just shoot at them.
The demo is a little misleading and here is why:
So, shaping a demo is tough. You want to give players a demo that feels full and is a good time on its own, but you also want the full game to be a surprise. One thing we want to make clearer is this: The demo is fairly linear; however, the full game is absolutely not. In fact, the mission to find the green access card is the most linear section of the game.
There is a major gameplay component we have not put in the demo - one that we are now discussing releasing into the demo in a future update, so that we can gather further feedback ahead of the game's release later in the year. We would likely release this new feature with the co-op update in coming weeks.
So, I'll leave this here for now, however, we will be providing more details on this soon. Once we make our plans and timing concrete.
There is a lot more we could go into, but that's it for today.
Thank you to everyone for all the support, all the kind emails, messages and posts, and for all the feedback - You really are making this game better and we don't want to let you guys down.
Thank you
Flatrock Games :)