Hello everyone!
Gamescom is over, and we are finally back with a lot of notes, feedback, and a much clearer picture of what we want to improve before the next major public step for Age After Age.
First of all, thank you to everyone who came to our booth. It was genuinely great to meet both players who already knew about the game and people who had never heard about Age After Age before walking up to the stand. Seeing someone recognize the game is always rewarding. Seeing someone discover it for the first time is equally valuable.
Because one of the biggest benefits of events like Gamescom is something you cannot fully reproduce with internal testing.
You Can Actually Watch People Play
You can explain a system, make a tutorial, and test it internally hundreds of times.
But then you put the game in front of a new player and immediately notice things that were invisible before.
Where do they move the cursor first?
Which button do they expect to click?
What information do they look for?
What do they ignore completely?
Where do they hesitate?
Gamescom gave us a lot of answers.
UX Is Now One of Our Main Priorities
Watching players interact with the current build helped us identify several UX improvements we want to implement before Steam Next Fest.
The functionality is there.
Now we want to make sure that accessing and understanding that functionality is as natural as possible.
That means working on things such as:
clearer information hierarchy
easier access to important systems
better feedback from player actions
improved readability of management interfaces
reducing unnecessary steps where possible
making important information easier to notice
improving how new players understand what the game expects from them
The goal is not to remove complexity.
Age After Age is still a management-heavy strategy game.
And if you are the kind of player who enjoys opening a building window, looking at numbers, changing wagon assignments, adjusting logistics, and squeezing another few percent of efficiency out of your city - don't worry. Those buttons are staying.
We want to improve the path to the information, not remove the micromanagement that gives the systems their depth.
The Demo Is Going to Change
And this brings us to something important. The demo currently available on Steam represents the version of Age After Age that we brought into this stage of development. Before Steam Next Fest, we are planning a significant update to that experience. UX will change. Interfaces will change. The way some information is presented will change.
So, a small warning. Or maybe a challenge.
The demo is going to change significantly.
Once the new version arrives, the current experience will no longer represent the game in the same way.
That means this is effectively your last chance to play the current version of the Age After Age demo before we start replacing parts of it with improvements directly from gamescom feedback.
If you wanted to try it, compare it later, or simply see what the game looked like before the next major UX pass - now is the time.
Sandbox Mode
This was one of the most frequently requested features we heard about, and we are now working on establishing a proper Sandbox Mode for the next version of the demo.
The current demo is structured around problems the player needs to understand and solve.
Sandbox will give players another way to experience the systems - with more freedom to build, experiment, optimize, and simply see what kind of city they can create.
Next Stop - Steam Next Fest
All our efforts will be put on Steam Next Fest as the next milestone.
There is still plenty to do, but this is exactly the kind of development stage we wanted to reach - where players are no longer only reacting to what we describe, but actively helping us understand how the game feels in real hands.
Thank you to everyone who played, talked to us, asked questions, gave feedback, or simply stopped by to take a look.
Now we take everything we learned there and put it back into the game.
See you in the next dev blog. And keep an eye on us during STEAM NEXT FEST.