David is on vacation this week, soaking up a little sun and visiting relatives in California before the last push out the door, so we’re working on a bunch of minor testing-motivated updates, which has mainly involved re-configuring internal stuff. Also, some UI work, which is always good.
First, we have added five new testers this week. Naturally, none of them can figure out the game! This is good, because it reveals all the hidden assumptions that you have been making, as well as the hidden assumptions that the other testers have now internalized. Then, you can fix those assumptions and get on with the next bit. Dredmor underwent a very similar process: if you go all the way back here in time, you can see early versions of the crafting system which we didn’t figure out was just totally awful until after we released the game. (There are some people, of course, who would argue that Dredmor’s crafting system is still awful, but oh well.) Getting a good game means fixing these issues.
For what it’s worth, player feedback has overwhelmingly been of the form “This is really good/promising/cool/great; here are fifty bug reports.” This is in line with our expectations, because Game Development.
Mr. Triolo has also been playing the game for the past half hour as I write this blog post in order to test some very special new animations for drinking in a chair. He has taken about seventeen screenshots of various things that are bothering him. This is also progress.
So what’s new on the code side?
