Roughly every two weeks we do a check-in with each other on the game’s progress. We sync up all the work we’ve been doing, make a build, and playtest the crap out of it to make sure it’s still headed in the right direction and to prevent any game-breaking bugs from carrying forward.
This week’s build consisted of over 15 different pathways, 10 mini-game rooms, and 3 bosses. To no surprise, we playtested it over 20 times and found a whole bunch of game-breaking bugs, such as gates closing on the players before they could leave the room and items not getting deleted when the mini-game ends. Now we have this massive list of things to fix before our next build. Yay!
An interesting finding was that platforming, specifically jumping across suspended platforms, was not good for pacing. It was really frustrating to fail the jumps over and over, and it became something only the more skilled players could pass through quickly. For a party game with a low skill cap where players gain enjoyment from messing with each other, this was not a desirable outcome. As a result we removed all the platforming-heavy pathways.
On the upside, good progress was made on a few things. The procedural generation is efficient and very speedy. Online networking is working much better—nearly all the replication issues we had previously are now taken care of. Lastly, the mini-games are turning out to be a lot of fun.
Dissonance Entertainment 