As I write this I'm sitting at my family home, slippers on the feet and the dulcet tones of a circular saw cutting through building material as they put up a house next door. 2025, and the second year of work on Tactichord: Glam Strategy is coming to an end and I find myself looking at the tail of the task board and thinking about what we've been doing this quarter.
Whereas in 2024 we did in-office user testing, this year we've shown Tactichord in public events more than ten times in Sweden and Japan! How is this possible? From the nerd cruise Moderskeppet Gaming to two appearances at Tokyo Indies, we've put Tactichord in front of gamers and gotten feedback. Just last night at Tokyo Indies I gave a short presentation on all the little adjustments to the UI to try and make it easier to understand and sell the dream of being a real hair metal musician.
The tutorial and on-boarding remain a challenge, though showing the game in a noisy conference hall or dark club is extra tough as it's not the best environment for people to be concentrating on a tactical game UI. Should we have more text callouts to explain you can change characters with the D-pad, or is an animated pointy arrow poking at the button glyph a better aid? These are the kind of questions that will always exist.
Looking at screenshots of the game from when we announced in January to now, you can see all kinds of little changes we made based on those public play tests.
DId you ever play those games as a child where you need to find all the differences between two images? Admittedly here there are two different levels being shown, but looking at the 2D UI you can see how the character selector moved closer to the resource meter/points cluster, the panels are color-coded, and contrast has been increased in lots of little key places. Now your progress to the next rank can be seen at any time during the level. This is a big thing if you're playing for points!
Not quite as helpful but definitely cool, the power move transition animations now have floating giongo (onomatopoeia) sound words, lightning, and a tighter camera crop. Go Joey!
As one final example, in terms of both style and substance we acted on feedback that players didn't understand the lyrical choices they were making, that they were important, and how they fit together. In a redesigned interface reminiscent of liner notes inside of CD covers you can now see your choices in the previous turns. This also gave an opportunity to add more shine on the character when choosing: a very tight shot, colored spotlights, and individual hot/cool poses for each musical choice you make. Sick!
So now we're moving into year three of the development of Tactichord: Glam Strategy. What's coming? Here are some things in the next quarter to whet your appetite.
More crazy costumes!
Playback music video camera improvements and camcorder overlays
Boss fights
A public demo!
But before that last one, you can help control the direction of those upcoming changes. Queue up for the next playtest now on the Steam page and join our Discord here to get early access and tell us what you think.
We've survived to '25, so now it's time to do some karate kicks in '26! (I'm accepting suggestions for an improvement on that tagline).
良いお年を！
/David