It's been a rough few weeks! I had to move to a new apartment in the middle of releasing a build for beta testing, and almost caught a cold. Wasn't very fun, but things are a lot calmer now that I've been back to work on the game full time.
The story/plot was well received, which was something that was bugging me in the back of my head. There's been a lot of feedback form the testers. The main issues revolved around some game-mechanic comprehension and the early game’s difficulty curve. The game is not designed to spell out every aspect of the engine to the player. I’ve always liked games with mechanics that are never explained but seem to be working in the background. Or, for instance, I find it rewarding when I discover a mechanic I could perform right from the beginning of the game. However, essential mechanics should almost always be explained in some way, and I missed doing this with a couple of things.
One of these things was the level-up system: leveling-up increases your magic attack and your defense, but nowhere is this ever mentioned. Originally, you could only level up from level 1 to 10, so any level ups would change your stats right away and you’d definitely notice. However, long ago I went back and made the game support levels 1-99, so the effects of leveling-up weren’t as clear now.
To fix this, I implemented a small stats window in the inventory screen (pictured above) to show the player her/his growth as she/he levels up. DEF and MATK increase automatically at different intervals, and they now clearly tell the player something’s happening. However, now that there are clear stats, it seems a bit counter-intuitive that the player can't interact with stats other than using accessories (all those +0's are accessory/equip modifiers for stats). I think SOTN did this too: let the game handle stat growth, taking the trouble of worrying about this from the player's hands, so perhaps it's a good thing.
Another thing that popped up from a couple of testers was the length of the introduction. Right now, it takes about 30-35 minutes to get down to the actual game world. You do get control of the game from the start, but go through several cutscenes and a small dungeon to get to know the story, characters and game world. I've shaved off several bits of this 'intro segment' over the months, but it seems like it might be a bit too long still. Considering this is a story-driven game of sorts, I'm not sure if I'd be harming the game by cutting out more stuff.
The other option that's come up is to make the intro dungeon longer so that it feels like a full gameplay segment, and then the remaining part of the intro will feel shorter. I'm all for doing this last, except that it would take some dev time to make it. I'll have to design this first and see if it's worth doing.
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Alonso Martin 
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