Hello everyone, and Happy New Year! So what's new for this month of January? Quite a lot actually!
Improving Flow
As mentioned in the last post, I started a 1st beta test with a small group of lucky (or not so lucky?) friends, players, and designers. The feedback has been incredibly helpful. So, over the past month, I’ve been primarily improving the "flow" of the game. By flow, I mean: Do players understand what to do? Where to go? Is it clear enough? Are they getting lost? Is it too difficult or too boring? These are "high-level" improvements that can only be tackled once the "low-level" aspects are stable enough (no bugs, stable mechanics, understandable UI, etc.).
Here are some of the changes I made:
- Added points of interest in various levels to guide the player’s eye, such as lanterns near important doors, contrasting plants (e.g., salads!), or floating particles.
- Adjusted the placement of key items to make them more visible (e.g., the pianist in the bar); removing surrounding grass, adding lights, or creating distinct shapes to draw attention.
- Enhanced readability by adding more contrast, such as larger cracks to hint at hidden secret walls, avoiding similar colors around important items, etc.
- Tweaked colors to avoid confusion between different key badges, laser beams, or other items.
- Added text bubbles that appear over distant important NPCs.
- Made bigger cannonballs for improved readability.
- Adjusted when new quests appear to better capture the player’s attention and fixed potential soft locks.
- Added auto-save zones for overly challenging levels.
- Updated maps with useful additional information.
- Added nav-island posts on visited islands (expanding the game’s teleport system to make ocean exploration smoother).
- Improved text and dialogue, adding emphasis by highlighting key words in different colors.
A more visible spot for the pianist
Turtles hang out around water salads and occasionnally "speak" to draw player's attention.
A few more info on the map.
Scaling Levels and the World
One of the main pieces of feedback from the beta test was that the world felt "too big and empty." So, I rescaled 4 of the largest and most annoying levels, as well as the world map. This was a huge task because I had to re-test all the levels to ensure that mechanics like jumps, projectiles, and distances still worked well—it wasn’t as simple as applying a global scale. Some elements had to remain their original size.
This scaling process corrupted previous save files (from beta testers and players who tried the demo), so I had to code a save porting system to ensure no progress was lost.
Rescaling the world also meant revisiting all the loading and activation zones for each island to avoid conflicts. Additionally, I had to rework the ocean textures to make them visually cohesive and compatible with the new world tiling.
For reference, the world is now 6x6km, still mostly water, with 18 zones/islands to explore. A few more zones are planned.
Lots of islands to discover.
Adding New Features
I also took the opportunity to add some new content to the game:
- A new level: the Aqualums Library.
- A painting shop on Aqualums.
- A zoom/dezoom feature for the map.
- Unrevealed areas on the map now show as "???" if you don’t have the local map.
- Added aiming animations for the character when jumping or falling.
And a few new upgrades for the player to discover:
- Focus Band: Slows time when aiming.
- Lightness Ring: Enables smooth landings (without noise) near guards.
- Pepper Salad: A boost for turtles, allowing them to travel faster and reducing journey time (this works well with the scaled-down world).
- Magnetic Core: An upgrade for one of the weapons.
- There are also now 4 outfits to collect, each with unique properties designed to be useful in different levels and situations.
An outfit to go faster.
General Upgrades
Finally, I’ve polished and improved several aspects of the game:
- Updated the final cutscene.
- Refactored weather zones code. Weather effects are now continuous in the open world, with sound effects and the ability to handle rain, thunder, pollen, snow, grass blades, and more. It’s also fully compatible with the world tiling.
- My father has started working on the Spanish translation.
- Fixed respawn zones (the zones that prevent falling into chasms) in all levels. Some were poorly designed and caused conflicts with cutscenes and dialogues, leading to soft locks.
- Cleaned up old components and unused code.
- Improved production tools: I can now generate all outside levels with a single click and perform better pre-release automated checks.
- Tons of minor fixes and improvements.
Now the rain appears and disappears smoothly.
In the end, as a result of the beta test (which is still ongoing), I’ve built and released 6 more versions of the game, taking it from 1.0.6 to 1.0.12.
Festivals
This month, I didn’t do much marketing for the game, but I applied to 6 festivals: Storyteller, LudoNarraCon, Precision Platformer, Sportacular (for "Slide," my other game), BIG LATAM, and Cozy & Family-Friendly Games Celebration. Fingers crossed!
A Little Christmas Game
Last but not least, for Christmas, I designed a small hidden object game where you search for family presents in my family’s house. I had previously made a similar game for my in-laws, but not for my own family. That’s been fixed now! You can play it for free here (in French, but you’ll figure it out):
Play it here
That’s it! Actually, this turned into quite a big update. The beta test will gradually open to more people, so stay tuned!
As always, thank you so much for your continued support.
Take care, and peace!
Mathias