Hi! Hope you're all doing well. The first round of pre-alpha playtesting with members of my discord server has just finished. Here's a video walking through some key findings while sharing a lot of fresh game footage for you to check out:
All in all the playtest was a really positive and productive experience, and I am so thankful for the testers lending me their time to help rattle out some gnarly bugs, identify pain points in need of attention, as well as verifying that some of the main strengths/draws I've been working very hard on seem to be bearing fruit, most notable for me being that players unanimously reported feeling very drawn in by the world and the sense of exploration and discovery the game offers (even with the limited content available in this early playtest!)
Finally, I was really happy to see that even with the rough edges, playtesters rated their overall experience very highly, and the median playtime was around 3 hours(!). I am knowingly taking a lot of risks in the design of this game, as making games that aren't for everyone but very much for someone is what being in the indie space is all about for me. Seeing that work and resonate with players feels really good and reassuring, as I know there's a lot more to come.
In the rest of this post I'd like to share with you some of the issues and what I'm doing to improve upon them, and also take the opportunity to speak a little on what I want Solbrand to be and cornerstones for me as developer.
1. Keeping Track
The game offers up a lot of little threads for you to pull on and explore, from "facts" strewn about the map to conversations on ancient texts with Worder Boye, but as players followed them it became difficult to keep track of all the things you had going on. This will only get worse over time as I have a lot of content planned for the game, so finding a good solution for this was a high priority.
Enter, the Log-module. Currently work in progress, but thought I'd share what I've got so far. It has two modes:
Logg. Tracks open questions and (some) notable events related to them. They're separated into categories, 1-8 for the chapter-specific questions, and a ninth for global questions that span the entire game.
Komm. Tracks every conversation you've had so that you can go back and reread things, or capture snippets to your archive with the transcript feature.
For my vision of Solbrand it is crucial that a system like this never gives you answers, only reminders of what questions are still open for you to explore and where you last left them, with one exception: When a question is considered resolved, it will be crossed out on the list.
There are no objective markers or waypoints in the game — apart from those you as a player set for yourself based on your interpretation of clues and archive material like maps or articles.
Transcripts in action.
2. Out of your Depth (Gauge)
One big positive, and a bit of a surprise to me to be honest, was that almost everyone reported little or no trouble grasping the purposely complex and cryptic interface after a little bit of time playing. My goal of having learning the machine be part of the exploration and discovery seemed to be working.
But! There was one big problem.
The game throws you in the deep end and you spend your first moments getting your bearings, gradually being introduced to the various systems at play. But when the time came to use one of the main tools at your disposal, your Depth Gauge, several players had forgotten all about it since the game had by then distracted them with other things.
Because of this, some players spent a long time searching around on the surface, but never managed to reach and explore the first ruin.
I have since worked on improving the pacing and order of the onboarding, as well as adding various small but helpful nudges and visual cues to remind the player of the gauge's existence and importance, some shown here:
3. Puzzling it out
Once players had solved the initial puzzle of finding and entering the first ruin, they were ready to tackle some more meaty puzzles. Here the typical (and expected) developer challenge reared its head. While more people than I thought actually managed to solve every puzzle in the playtest, and most made good headway overall, others found found themselves stuck at various stages, unsure how to progress.
Pausing briefly to talk intentions, I very much intend for Solbrand to be a challenging game. It should ask for a lot, but give you even more in return. Rewarding, but also fair.
Striking this balance is very difficult, as what may seem obvious to me as developer can turn out to be completely opaque to most players, and when I think I'm being fiendishly clever, player might see through it right away. This, I think, is simply the nature of creating puzzle games, and the good method is to keep testing and iterating until I hit the sweet spot I want to hit, which I'll do that all the way up to release.
As a first improvement I've added more easily accessible and repeatable clues for some particularly tricky parts, and also tried to streamline the tracking of information through improvements like the Log mentioned above.
4. Honorary mention
As part of chasing down fragments and sites you engage with various minigames, teased in previous posts. These vary in difficulty, and while most along the so called golden path are fairly easy, I've also added some optional ones that are incredibly hard. The latter are meant as a fun extra challenge for the happy digital masochists among us, but failed to sufficiently communicate this to other players, causing some to bang their head against the wall for a long time thinking it was the only way forward in the story.
I have since added visible difficulty indicators on the targets, which should help give the player a hint that the difficulty is intended and probably not part of the main story path.
Minigame challenge indications.
That's all for this time!
One last thing: Due to some extra interest I will be giving out a couple more keys to people who want to try out this early pre-alpha build now. If you're one of them, drop by the discord and say hello and I can set you up!