Thank you!
First of all, thank you to everyone who participated!
It is now clearer than ever how valuable crowdsourcing feedback and collecting analytics are to understanding what's working (or not). Up until the first Steam playtest, we'd only seen friends & family try the game out, so this was our first check against a real audience of regular players. We really appreciate everyone who took the time to take our game out for a spin.
What did we learn?
The game is too hard.
Almost no players made it to the halfway point in a run.
We have a "death spiral" problem, where you lose your best stuff and each attempt to recover gets harder than the one before it while you sit at a difficult your skill hasn't progressed to yet.
We need to be better prepared to make significant balance changes partway into a playtest.
There isn't enough variety or incentive to keep coming back for another run. We did have some returning players, which is incredible and very encouraging, but we need to provide more of a salve to the battered and defeated player.
What's next?
We're going to dive back into a dev cycle for a few months and try to address some of our concerns, the primary one being that too many players aren't getting to experience the whole game. We want it to be skillful and challenging, but it's clear that our control scheme is unorthodox enough that we need to make the learning curve a little less steep.
Here are some high-level initiatives we're approaching first:
Rework difficulty such that players can opt-in to an easier difficulty from the very start (think like casual vs. regular difficulty), with heightened difficulty options being available to unlock.
We also want the difficulty to go more in the direction of gameplay differences over just having more and more enemies to fight at once.
Add significantly more variety to the loot variety, particularly in the early game, such that runs start to feel more different from one another.
Introduce a mechanism that allows you to roll some kind of benefit or choice from one run, failed or not, into the next run, to give you more of a reason to restart and try one more time.
Take a hard look at the run economy design, which is currently pretty opaque and hard to understand, and try to implement something that's more intuitive and obvious.
Long-term, we'd also like to redesign the tutorial to feel more like an actual mission, instead of a purely functional explanation of game mechanics.
In the meantime, thanks again and please join our community on Discord, where we're posting regular updates of our progress. Bye for now!
-tol