Hey everyone,
This Dev-Update will be a bit unusual. Last weekend we held the first ever pre-alpha playtest with members of the EQUIRE Discord. In the weeks leading up to the playtest I worked on countless small improvements, fixing bugs and adding little touches throughout the game, so listing every change would not really make sense this time. Instead, I would like to share my personal experience from the playtest and talk about the feedback I received during and after the event.
Running an early playtest has been a goal since the beginning of development. I think it is crucial to validate that the core ideas of the game are not only fun in my head but also enjoyable for players. When I got back into development at the start of the year I set myself the goal of announcing the playtest during Horse-Fest and then running it two weeks later. This created a fairly ambitious deadline, but it also gave me a lot of motivation. During that time I focused on fixing and polishing existing mechanics instead of adding new features. By the time Horse-Fest arrived I felt confident enough to announce the playtest. The response was amazing. More than 200 people from the Discord community signed up.
When the playtest weekend arrived I had managed to implement most of the features I wanted feedback on, but I also had to cut several improvements that I now need to add afterwards. Looking back I probably should have planned more time before the playtest to simply play the game myself and eliminate the worst bugs. Instead I pushed to add as many features as possible so the game would feel more complete and accessible.
Unfortunately this meant that when the playtest started on Friday many players ran into some nasty bugs. I immediately started fixing issues and pushing updates to make the game more playable. Over the course of the weekend I released seven updates and fixed problems that ranged from disappearing ranches to trapped horses and UI issues. I still think including many systems for feedback was the right idea in principle, but the bugs unfortunately prevented some productive testing. For the next playtest I will try to avoid such a tight schedule so I can eliminate the most obvious issues beforehand and hopefully get a bit more sleep as well.
Despite the bugs a lot of people played extensively and provided incredibly helpful feedback. Thank you for that. I really appreciated how understanding the community was about the early state of the game while still giving honest and constructive criticism.
Overall the feedback was very positive. Most of the core ideas behind the game were received well. The main points of criticism focused on bugs, the lack of tutorials and explanations, and controls that sometimes felt unintuitive. These were all things I expected to some extent. The game already contains quite a few complex systems and right now there is very little structure guiding the player. Tutorials and clearer explanations were already on my to-do list, but I intentionally postponed them so I could finish more mechanics before the playtest. Your feedback has given me many ideas on how to improve the controls and confirmed that a good tutorial system will be essential for a game like EQUIRE.
In the end the playtest was a big success thanks to your patience and the great feedback you shared. It was incredibly encouraging to see people engage with the game and to hear that many of the core ideas are working. I also gained a lot of insights that I definitely would not have discovered on my own.
While the playtest weekend was very exciting I am now looking forward to returning to a more sustainable development schedule. And if you missed it, do not worry, we will definitely run more playtests in the future!