Week 15: Devlog (Release)

Now that this project is complete, I think its safe to say we learned a lot from it. It has the longest development period of any of our projects to date, and it was our first time going through each of the stages of production. One of my main takeaways was that games designed to be 'difficult' may not be well suited to shorter development times. Although this was our longest project, it was still only 3-4 months, and we were working on other things alongside it. Being difficult is fine, but you need to take the time to introduce players to the mechanics and get a feel for the game before you really start challenging them. 

Due to the limited scope, we ended up rushing players through the tutorial, so our playtesting showed that players didn't have any of the necessary understanding of the games physics. It was also hard to tell how useful some of the playtest data was as many playtesters clearly weren't experienced with more challenging games, and didn't enjoy the trial-and-error aspect of the game.

It wasn't all negative though. Despite players finding the levels too hard, most were receptive to the movement itself and reacted positively to the art and music. Seeing the level of polish of the end product was also satisfying, having a project of this scope which featured complete mechanics and functionality as well as exclusively non-stub art assets.

I think the main things to change next time would be to take the planned scope of the project into account when deciding the difficulty, and also to be careful when choosing physics-heavy designs, as it can be challenging and time-consuming to make them feel smooth.