Hey everybody
Lot's has happened in the past weeks. A crazy start into the year :)
A bit behind schedule, we playtested Castle Come over the second weekend of January. For this we used the internal play testing system available through Steam where people were able to sign up to starting from October.
We've unlocked 300 playtesters and gave them access to the newest Version 0.9.22.21 Rhäzüns.
As a small play test it gave important feedback to the onboarding process also as we added some telemetry tracking to get some insights what people are doing and how far they are advancing.
It became really clear that the start is hard to get through, there is too little explanation and some mechanics are easily missable if you don't take care. Luckily the playtest forced us to fix several technical issues and we went through the weekend without any big bugs.
So whats to change?
That's why we decided that we work on two essential things. Adding more storytelling to comment on players progress in learning mechanics like "picking up items" or the "hunting mode" to have more direct feedback and explain the in-world narration more.
We've scattered multiple NPCs and recruitable crew members on the path to the gate and have them physically gate you from progressing if you didn't do what you were intended to learn.
Additionally we are adding better telemetry (we are using "Game Analytics", quite simple to add to your game). It's kinda tricky to intuitively put in markers to track progress which is then easy to get actionable follow up out of.
For example:
Progression got tracked with "Hunting Phase Start" and "Hunting Phase Complete", for when you drop a core at the gate. This came from the style of tracking a event generally. This made it hard to create stacks of steps and filters to produce good overviews on what people did.
What you want to do is track the data with more info. And don't try to put too much info together . If we need something that also tracks the progress with the gate (Which Hunting Phase is kinda doing) we just add it as a separate tracking call.
Now we catch "Hunting Phase Start" + Cores at the Gate + Time since level Start. This feels like a small chance but now you can clearly structure your funnels and see how far people play and where they struggle the most.
So now the playtest is going live for the weekend again and we are looking forward on gathering information again. This first play test already helped us a lot in getting a better feeling on how player interact with the game and we hope to learn lots more.
So hop over into the playtest and join the Discord to catch up!
Best wishes and thanks for playing.
Sam & Basil