Devlog #9: Production (again)

What have I been doing?

As I said before in previous devlogs, I am acting as Team Ronald!'s dedicated level designer, and my biggest task over the course of production so far has been to design and implement the 15 levels we wish to have in our game. Recently though, my role has been shifting closer to that of a production manager for reasons I'll get into real soon.

So how has production been going so far?

Well, since my last devlog was uploaded, I'm happy to say that the team has had far fewer hiccups overall as of recently. We just got our second round of playtests done, and they yielded some very high-quality feedback, thanks in large part to the awesome efforts of our programmers. Our older build I talked about during the last devlog was very buggy and it made gathering feedback on things we actively wanted to know about more difficult. While we do still have some bugs present, it's far better than it once was. I've also been able to gather feedback on all 15 of our levels, because I managed to complete all of them! They are all implemented into the game. Unfortunately, some of them are still unable to be completed by players due to some functionality currently missing from our build, but they are in there.

Where can we go from here?

As for me, even though all the levels are implemented, it does not mean my work as a level designer is done.  In fact, I just recently made a tutorial level. We gathered a lot of feedback that basically said we don't do a great job showing people what the controls/objective of the game are, and one suggestion that came up a lot was the addition of a tutorial. The core geometry of the level is all implemented into the game, but some more supplementary stuff needs to be added to make it a truly great learning tool. And on top of that, of course, I'll still be updating the main levels as we go according to the feedback we receive, and once our modifiers are programmed and fully functional, I'll need to edit them some more to make them work properly with the system. But as of right now, level design work has slowed down considerably. As such, I've focused my attention more on helping my other teammates get their own work done, as a producer would. That's obviously going to involve a lot of planning and scheduling and other kinds of management work, but I'm looking forward to it. The last chunk of production we just went through has made me very excited to see the future of the game!