This saturday I got to playtest the game at the Vancouver Twitch Meetup! I had an awesome time and got to meet tons of great people learning a lot about the game in the process!
Got out of there with a huge list of things to fix/change! Best thing was seeing people actually enjoying the hell out of the singleplayer, and trying again until they managed to kill the boss! Only 2 people got to kill Uncle Knuckle though, despite many more attempting xD it was awesome seeing them retrying and learning the patterns!
Found some pesky bugs still from the changes into one-scene for everything some things weren't getting cleaned up properly from one scene to another, so playing on the singleplayer and then going into multiplayer was causing some problems with players being controlled by multiple controllers.
Also noticed some things that were making the singleplayer really hard for some people. Increased the number of starting lifes to 6, decreased the explosion radius and got rid of the game over screen when you lose a life (so it drops you straight back into the action). The game over screen now only appears when you run out of lives,in which case if you decide to continue instead of bringing you back to 0 progress it only makes you lose 2 levels worth of progress. Punishing but not that punishing.
Another nerf that I did was on the biggest jerk of the game, the shielded enemy, he was way too mean, so I nerfed him a bit by slowing down his turn speed and making it so that whenever he gets hit in his shield he'll get stunned for a moment, giving you a chance to get the upper hand on him.
I also changed the colors surrounding the enemies, so you can tell at a glance what kind of enemy that is (Before all with the same colors it was harder to spot which enemy you should worry about first, like the bomb enemies).
Another thing I noticed was that unless I was one of the players and actively went back to the menu to pick a different level between matches, people would just keep playing in the same level over and over. For that I did 2 fixes. One, I changed the button on the multiplayer game over to read “SELECT LEVEL” instead of “MENU”, so maybe that will prompt people to click it to change levels between matches. And the other fix was the introduction of a RANDOM ARENA mode, where it'll pick a random arena for each match
No better way of keeping things fresh than that!
I also finally found sort of a fix for people who want to play but don't have a gamepad handy! Now it's possible to play with the mouse, using the left mouse button to move the character towards the mouse direction, and either spacebar or right mouse button to shoot. You can actually see it in the Shielded Enemy nerf gif earlier in this post, that reticle in the floor is the mouse position. When I'm playtesting something and too lazy to pick up the controller that's my new favorite way of playing.
Oh, another cool thing, at the meetup I met a really cool streamer that loved the game and asked me if I'd be interested in him streaming the game.
He did a stream on it the other day and him and his viewers were the best! Such great ideas and feedback! :D The mouse to move idea actually came out of a conversation in his chat that day. The twitch interaction stuff didn't work though, no idea why :/ So I decided to make some changes to make it more reliable and to make it easier to debug.
So now when you select twitch interaction you get to put your channel in, press Connect and actually see the server messages, and see if the connection was actually stablished or not. Even chat messages would be visible in that box, so if twitch interaction is working you'll know right away, and if it isn't you'll have some information to figure out why it isn't working.
Lastly, at a friend's suggestion I increased Uncle Knuckle's fists, and it looks way more awesome :O easier to hit his fists, but harder to dodge. I like it!
To close this post, I'll leave you with my favorite gif replays from the Twitch Meetup:
#1 This match that ended so quickly it's all in the replay!
#2 This one where a really improbable indirect shot actually landed.
#3 This slow motion persistent fist finally hitting it's target
Community
