We got a lot of feedback from demoing the project and having anyone who wanted to come up and play it. There were definitely bugs that are being ironed out so I won't talk about those, but I will write about some notable topics people brought up, as well as observations from me.
Level design:
This one is 100% on me. I created this coastal city with some winding paths, bridges, and shortcuts. As you progress through the level, you slowly fight new varieties and larger numbers of enemies. A player progressing normally will have decent equipment and few levels to deal with the challenge.
What I did not expect was players to take windy side routes and avoid most conflicts and gear, resulting in them getting into difficult fights with little to no gear.
Respawning:
Throughout the level was about 4-5 of these 'markers'.
They are the equivalent of 'check points' in that you respawn at them, but you need to walk up and touch them to activate them. Most players skipped these entirely. My theory is that don't look particularly interesting so it was easy to skip.
Another idea would be to have them auto-activate if you get near them. Maybe an NPC can point them out but that feels cheap.
Regardless this system will definitely get tuned up.
Art:
I got some praise and some confusion on the art style. Players generally seemed to like the simpler style as it was pretty easy to tell what's going on. What was not liked was a lot of items use the same color palettes as other objects, making some items fairly difficult to see if you weren't looking directly at it.
This was amplified by the fact some items are hard to aim at and pick up, due to them being small or oddly shaped.
This should be pretty easily fixable.
Other:
- As it stands the inventory 'book' system is a little too slow to use and will likely be getting some slight design changes.
- Several players asked for more destructible objects and things to interact with. Specifically, brute forcing doors.
- Wall jumping works on some objects that it probably shouldn't work on, which was more confusing to players than anything.
- The player's death animation takes too long. This is actually a bug, but the AI adds insult to injury and will kick you on the ground as you die and that came off as kind of mean.
There are other minor gameplay and UI elements we're going to re-evaluate or refine, though most of the core elements I believe will stay the same. That being said I was hoping to prepare for an early access or beta release as the next major thing post-expo, but I don't think the game is quite there yet.