Building the demo

   The closed demo is just about finished, and we've been testing the scenes vigorously, as well as asked a few friends try them out. So far the results are positive, but have also forced us to make some changes and fine-tuning to the gameplay. This will surely be an ongoing process as the testing continues, but its a good start!

Gameplay tweaking

   One of the noteworthy improvements we saw as a necessity to work on was the player controls. Moving the character using touchscreen is very different compared to mouse on a pc, so we needed to alter the touch controls accordingly which gave some great results.

   Slowing down the player movement speed by ~20% was also a surprisingly pleasant change as it makes the game feel smoother, instead of running around with fire under your ass.

   The surrounding world was slowed down accordingly so now the player has more time to dodge enemy projectiles and won't find a CraBot smashing his face within seconds after being sighted by one.

Getting the whole package together with more UI elements

Testing the game

   As developers it's sometimes easy to get blind to the gameplay and it becomes hard to think outside the box. That's why testers are a needed. Just observing how someone plays your game can fill up your notepad full of observations and thoughts you could never figure out yourself, even before you are drowned by the praises, complaints, suggestions and wishes from the player in question.

   Getting feedback straight from the player is not to be underestimated and that's why we will start handing out the the game to more friends and colleagues next week before submitting it to more public testing later this spring.

   It's always funny to look the old screenshots and videos of the game. It can be a bit embarrassing but at the same time very uplifting because you see how much progress has been made.

Ancient screenshot for comparison

About Unity 5 again

   As a closing note, our plans to port the game to Unity 5 are being delayed a bit because early tests revealed some issues with lightmapping workflow and other areas. Also we don't want to delay the first demo any further so the focus is on that 100%. We will start the porting in a few weeks though so expect to read about it then.

That's it for this post, thanks for reading!