Hey, builders!
Playtest is closed. Thank you to everyone who jumped in and filled in the survey at the end. 1713 people have played the game and left us an unbelievable 5 as a median score! WOW
One complaint came back more often than almost anything else: stones. A quarter of you said that hunting for them was among the least enjoyable parts of the whole test. Hard to argue — so that's where devlog #1 goes.
Digging through your feedback, the problem turned out to have three separate causes:
There simply weren't enough stones near the player
The stones blended into the environment and were easy to walk straight past
The locations were full of lookalike props you couldn't interact with at all
So instead of just scattering more rocks around, we're fixing it on several fronts: making stone locations make sense, making the stones themselves easier to spot, and adding a whole new way to get them.
📍 Where the stones live now
Stones will now show up much more often near rivers and lakes, and across mountain and rocky terrain. No more sweeping the forest floor at random — if you need stone, you'll know where to head.
🔍 Object highlighting
This one is already up and running. The highlight system marks every object you can actually interact with in a small radius around you. It's bound to V by default, so one tap tells you what's real and what's scenery.
⛏️ Breakable boulders and the pickaxe
We're adding a new tool: the pickaxe. With it you'll be able to break stone straight out of boulders, instead of relying on whatever the ground decided to give you.
The mechanic itself is still in development, so for now all we can show you is the tool. It looks good, though. Trust us on the swinging part.
🗿 Making stones look like stones
We're also reworking the stone textures so they stand out properly from the ground around them. On top of that, we're clearing the non-interactive props out of the locations — the ones that look exactly like a collectible stone right up until you walk over and press the button.
Put together, all of this should turn stone gathering from a scavenger hunt into something you can actually plan around.
If you've got thoughts or ideas on how would you fix certain parts of the game or what you want to add, drop them in the comments — we're reading everything.
See you in Devlog #2 👋
Project Zima team