Hello fellow co-conspirators!
This week was pretty fun, focussing on playtesting the game, finding bugs and polishing it up.
Contrary to popular belief playtesting is not the same as QA testing. The latter focuses mostly on finding bugs and broken systems (like missing art), while the former is about putting the game in front of players and seeing how they react. And that’s exactly what I did.
The testing went well, all things considered. This is the first round, so there are a lot of things that needed to be communicated more clearly; particularly in the tutorial.
I’m also seeing that there doesn’t seem to be much thought on why use bravery, charm or resources (our three main stats) to attack another unit. All three of them give the same result, so players are just chosing which ever is the quickest. Suffice to say, that for a strategy game a decision that is automatic is not the best. I have some ideas on how to solve this, but first I’ll be doing a few more tests this week to confirm my assumptions.
In the meantime, I’ve been using the downtime between tests to finally start polishing the art. The first target were the units themselves. Not only were they plain, but it was hard for players to distinguish their surveillance level (i.e. how much info they have on them) at a glance.
As a reminder this is what they used to look like:
Before… 
…After
But now they look like this:
As for those that you haven’t investigated yet… well they look like this:
It’s amazing what a nice shader can do. 😉
This week I’ll keep polishing and testing; in particular those menus need some love. Next week I’ll be away on a trip so there might not be much development happening, however I do expect to be back with some cool things to show off.
Happy conspiring!