Devblog Update #45: My wife broke the game…

To be fair, she was the one who suggested I use that title. 😉

We’ve spent a lot of these past two weeks polishing features in preparation for a demo launch today. I made the mistake of waiting to do thorough playtesting until the last minute. My wife was excited to play the game, so she did! Sitting next to her as she played, I took a lot of notes on things that could be improved or weren’t intuitive/clear. She had made it through the overworld section of the level, and into the Vault, when, after completing a challenge… the door to the next area didn’t open…

That game-breaking bug, all the numerous other improvements, and the fact that the laptop in my parents’ basement that serves as our Perforce server went down hard this morning mean that we’re going to have to push the Demo back a week. I am uploading the game files to the cloud server I showed how to set up in the last blog post as I type this.

 

This past sprint I’ve also been working on an NPC who will be the Caretaker of Zone 2. With how familiar I’ve gotten with modeling gryphons and such, modeling humanoid characters is hard!!! After a lot of work, all I had was this:

Not the look I was going for at all. Thankfully, due to a lot of solid feedback, and many hours spent tweaking things, I was finally able to have something I’m proud to show.

Although she may look young, she is the oldest character we’ve met in the game so far. She swore an oath to never leave her post guarding the Tree, and there she will remain.

 

Here’s the timelapse video posted last week! Timelapse of the level design process for the final room of the Vault.

 

Anyways, rain or shine, there WILL be a demo next Friday. Look forward to it!

 

Join our Discord if you want to stay more involved, and give feedback! https://discord.gg/JEjteYe