With the Twitter ban in Brazil, I'm loosing 16% of my followers so from now on I’m going to post more on Steam. Hopefully Steam won't be banned in Brazil.
Tough summer. Love the sunshine and everything, but development on Dawn One has been tricky. I had 2 games industry professionals test an early build back in June (one works in marketing, the other is lead QA), and it was a bit of a reality check:
The QA guy liked combat and art, so that’s good. He thought the combat was too simple, though. It is by design, but ok. I decided to take it on board and make combat more tactical.
The marketing guy didn’t like the gameplay at all. He didn’t say that but I can read between the lines 🙂 He thought the main character Dawn was awesome though. From his perspective as a marketing professional, she is the strongest element of the game (I’ll take it).
Both of them were not sure what to do between nights. In Dawn One you fight during the night, and during the day you can upgrade some combat elements, repair armor, things like that. While polished, those interactions are too barmy (by design) and aren’t supported with UI elements at the moment. Both thought that part was not intuitive at all, and that’s something I’ll be working on in the future.
So I spent most of the summer improving combat mechanics and added jumping. It was tricky, because in a top-down camera angle, jumps don’t look obvious. I found the solution by flying the character right by the camera. It looks cool and I think it’s pretty fun, so I’m pretty happy with that.
I also reworked all the movements of NPCs, so sometimes they keep their distance with Dawn, making it less like a whack-a-mole and make the player think twice before attacking and positioning Dawn.
I’m pretty happy with the progress made in the last few months, and even though I’ve been play testing Dawn One for years, I still enjoy the combat system and I’m not bored of it after hundreds of hours. That’s got to be a good sign -- that’s what keeps me going.
That’s it, that’s the dawn diary for today. Thanks for your attention! Live long and prosper and may the force be with you.