Devlog #11: Production (once again)

What have I been doing?

Most of my time recently has been spent making Ladder Louie's Labour Laws' final official playtest report. Of course, this means I mainly devoted my effort towards finding playtesters, organizing playtest sessions, gathering feedback, looking over survey results, and other standard playtesting tasks like that. Outside of that though, I've been mainly acting in a more managerial role, trying to keep the team on track and up-to-date with the tasks we needed complete in time for testing.

So how'd that go?

For the most part, the playtests went rather well. One thing's for sure, we gathered a ton of valuable feedback. This time around, we reused our strategy of getting designers to be testers to ensure high-quality, thorough feedback. However, we put more effort into getting more playtesters overall, specifically returning testers, so we could get their insights into how the game has improved over time. One consistent piece of feedback we've been getting is that players appreciate the tutorial, but are still having trouble with the controls despite that. This lead us to believe that there's a fundamental issue with how our controls are laid out. We also saw that not many players were responding to our message as we'd hoped.

Where can we go from here?

Now, we really just need to polish up the game and implement the last bits of feedback we received. The team has already begun to brainstorm new control schemes that could be more familiar to newer players, and we've furthered our efforts to make our message clearer and more present overall. We now have a system in place to put mid-level screens in place between levels. The plan is to fill these mid-level screens with information relating to the game's narrative and message. As for controls, we've begun testing on a new control scheme that uses WASD with spacebar as the new jump key. Hopefully, that'll make the game easier to get into once it's finally released to the public!