We've had a ton of feedback on our new Occlude Demo for NextFest. Plenty positive, a few negative, and the vast majority asking for one feature above all - An Undo button.
Undo Button
Partly because we had a great deal of early feedback saying the difficulty was "just right" and partly for Secret Reasons that'll become obvious when you play the final game, an Undo mechanic was something we were planning for after the NextFest Demo.
However it's become abundantly clear from feedback the Undo is absolutely necessary and necessary right now. So, your past mistakes can now be undone - We've worked at breakneck speed overnight to bring you an Undo button.
For those of you concerned this will make the game trivial, do not worry - This won't let you undo everything.
You can now undo moves up to the point you put a card in the Foundation. What this means is, if you accidentally lock yourself by moving cards around the Tableau (a common complaint), you don't have to reshuffle with a New Deal every time.
Make sure you update the Demo to get this change and let us know what you think.
Clearing Save Files
We've also had feedback saying that clearing game saves have had a few issues, including odd animations and game softlocks. We've identified this problem and pushed up that change to the demo with the Undo button update.
If you're playing on old branches from playtesting and wanted to clear your saves manually, don't forget you can copy paste %USERPROFILE%\\\\AppData\\\\LocalLow\\\\Tributary Games\\\\Occlude\\\\Saves into your File Explorer to delete SAVEFILE.save in there.
Feedback: Next Steps
We're not stopping there, of course. As a studio we pride ourselves on listening to our player's feedback and making changes based off of them.
We're looking at five major bits of feedback we've had in the first 24 hours:
RNG difficulty/balance - We're hearing that the shuffle of cards in a new game is causing headaches for players. Essentially - You feel like the difficulty is too high. We're looking at our generation system to get you into the flow of Occlude quicker while keeping the challenge for those of you who enjoy the current level of difficulty.
Locked game indicator - You're asking for better feedback when a game can't be advanced, so we're taking a look at making the Undo and Reshuffle buttons animate, depending on game state, to make it clearer when you need to use them.
Speed/'snappiness' of cards - People are finding card movement too sluggish. That's a nice straightforward fix which we can get on straight away.
Cards coming off screen - We're aware that with certain resolutions sizes larger stacks of cards are coming off the screen. We have a fix for this we're working on right now.
Casual Mode - Lots of players are asking for a casual mode. This one is difficult - We're a small team and this would mean we'd have to build a whole other game mode in a short time, taking us away from vital other work. We're looking at our backlog of jobs to do and figuring out what can be done in the time and budget we have. No promises, I'm sorry to say, but we have some ideas how we can help.
There is, of course, more feedback than this - But we've determined these are our top targets from the first 24 hours.
If your feedback isn't above we've still recorded it and endeavor to answer it in time.
And finally...
Thank you all so, so much for the feedback.
Making games, especially at the size we are, isn't easy and we don't always get it right the first time. We're sadly only human. However, with your feedback, we can make Occlude something really special.
Please be patient while we do this!
I'm super happy we got this change out in under 24 hours, but making a game is anything but easy and we have to balance finishing the game with feedback changes. It's a balance we don't always get right, but one we're committed to doing so.
So go update the Demo, give it a spin, tell us what you think, and we'll keep on hammering away at code in the background. Expect some more updates soon.
Sam
