Welcome everyone to June's edition of TGLT devblog! It's been a while since the last devblog in April, isn't it? We were busy for most of the last 2 months, updating and polishing the Playtest based on your feedback.
Did you play it? And if so, did you enjoy it? We sure poured a lot into what we are showing you, so I hope you can see our passion and commitment to bringing this project over the line.
As we soon prepare to launch our demo, our playtest will be closed by next week. Thank you so much to everyone that played: Finding bugs, providing feedback, and even just trying it out is something we truly appreciate. Let us check the stats for the playtest.
To start with the not-so-good news: Most of those that sadly finished playing at 10 minutes or so were during the first days of the Playtest. I admit that there were lots of onboarding issues there, such as the unnecessarily long opening cutscene that didn't really add anything to the lore. While we believe the current opening cutscene is better, it still hasn't provided certain important information that we have not yet seen here.
Although I had wished you would come back to give the Playtest another chance, it is what it is. Hopefully, with all we have done in the 4 updates and more, our demo will perform better than this one.
Personally, I'd like to see at least 50-70% of players reaching 30+ minutes. Let's see if that can be done!
Numbers-wise, with 92 players - I would say we are lacking in sample size, therefore we definitely could do with a more massive, open testing. While the Playtest is an open one, we understand that the expectations are different compared to a demo.
However, it's insane that 10 players actually played more than 200 minutes, with one of you actually clocking above 10 hours! Considering that the playtest is meant to be complete by 1 hour at most, this is really surprising. Thank you so much for your interest in our game, and we definitely have more coming for you.
To be honest, we thought someone might just be keeping the game on, idling on the splash screen haha. Hopefully, that's not the case.
We have received some sharp, but important feedback on what the playtest provided so far:
Lack of surprises: Making the game flow feel too constant, where the first 3 turns will shape the rest of the mission's experience
The Time Spells feel more like simple QoLs instead of an actual unique feature of the game
Additionally, they are not explained well enough to tie into the game's lore
Feelings that the rest of the game's feature (Town, etc) can be better tied-in to the game's time manipulation aspect
What we can surmise from our progress so far is that we are getting the fundamentals right for your typical SRPG, but it is not yet a Time-Travelling Roguelike SRPG (or otherwise, barely one). These are two very distinctive things, as we now must stamp the game's identity as a time-manipulation game.
The good thing is, with the fundamentals around, we can expand it into a truly unique experience while making sure it's an enjoyable one. We are adding things to an existing experience rather than overhauling one. It takes me back to some bizarre-but-true experiences we had last year... but that's a story for another time.
Our team has discussed on our next plans, and here's what we'll provide in our demo:
Various QoL updates, with even more to come in the future
2 side missions, including one where you can face off against an enemy Hero for the first time
Graphical polishing for tile-related visuals
We'll try our best to have one or two of the added features ready, but no promises!
To summarize: We should not, and will not stop improving the game once the demo is out. We'll update you again next week as we close TGLT's playtest. Still so much to come from us, so please look forward to our continued progress!