Hello everyone, Duhop here! Pardon me for the late devlog this month, unfortunately I spent the entire first week of February sick in bed 🙁
On the flipside, though, I do have some great progress and news to share with you all today!
All through January, we’ve been focusing our efforts specifically on polishing up Act 2 of AJG so we can get it ready for another round of public playtesting, and at this point, we can comfortably say it will be ready to go by the end of February 😀
If you’re interested in getting early access to Act 2 and helping us out with your feedback, you can join our discord server if you haven’t already for updates and information on how to participate. Active playtesters will receive a free copy of the game upon release, and will also have their names listed in the credits!
Now, for the actual devlog portion of this devlog, I’m gonna go back in time to our original round of playtesting to take a look at just how valuable some of the feedback we received ended up being to make Act 1 what it is today.
For a specific example, let’s look at how the chatroom UI evolved according to playtesting feedback. Here’s the unfinished UI that was in the 1.7 version of the demo we first used for playtesting:
First off, playtesters found a bug that I hadn’t yet noticed myself, and I was able to track it down and fix it almost immediately.
Next, this feedback confirmed my worries that the inner narration was confusing as it was implemented initially, and needed some better way to distinguish itself from the actual chatroom dialogue.
And finally, there was a good amount of feedback that the chatroom UI should more closely resemble an actual, functional computer program, which I did agree with despite some caveats.
For pretty much all the feedback you receive, you do have to take into account the fact that playtesters have a lot less context for certain decisions than you do as a developer. This feedback was great, and would have made a lot of sense to go through the effort of implementing completely… if the chatroom UI remained as important throughout the rest of the game as it is in Act 1/the demo. Since it isn’t actually used much outside of Act 1 though, it doesn’t make sense to implement such a complex system if we aren’t going to continue using it.
In this case, after explaining my reasoning, the playtester agreed as well!
I did, however, fully embrace their ideas to implement timestamps and profile pictures for the final version of the chatroom UI. Also featured here is the solution we ended up going with to make the inner narration visually distinct from the actual chatroom dialogue, which I think turned out quite well! I haven’t had any more feedback that the two were difficult to differentiate since this version was implemented.
I think this is a great example of how playtesting can help bring development to the next level, and I hope you think so too. Again, come say hi on our discord server if you’re interested in helping out!
I hope to see you there 😀
-Duhop