Devlog #8: Production

What have I been doing?

As the team's dedicated level designer, my main duty on the production schedule has been to design and implement the 15 levels we wish to have in our game. I've been following a consistent schedule of designing and implementing three of these levels per week. As of me writing this post, I only have three levels left to go.

So how has production been going so far overall?

As of right now, production has had a few more hiccups than the team would have liked. While some members of the team have been able to follow the schedule rather smoothly overall, some of our teammates have had to push back their work a little bit in order to account for unexpected difficulties. These difficulties were mainly things that weren't caught during the designing phase, like faults in level design or bugs. Many of these faults were found during our first dedicated playtest period. For example, one tester found a way for players to essentially softlock themselves if they fall down a certain hole. While this did make it harder to receive the feedback we would have liked, it did help us a lot to see what aspects of our game needed some more time in the oven, and that's very valuable in its own right.

Where can we go from here?

Since the faults were found, the team has put a lot of effort into patching them up in time for the next batch of playtests, and so far, things are looking better. I fixed many of the faults that were previously found in the level designs, and the programmers have fixed quite a few of the larger bugs we found, which is super great. From here on out though, I don't have many more new levels I need to design, so my focus will likely be shifting more towards going back and editing previous levels to polish them up further with decorations and additional feedback. I'm very much looking forward to the coming playtests we do, and I'm super excited for the final product!