We recently did our alpha playtest and we all think it went well. We found some major and minor problems. Some of the reoccurring issues our play testers faced in our game was the movement. Most of the players said they feel like the movement was ‘too floaty’ and not snappy enough, especially for a game like ours. This was luckily an easy fix since all we had to do was tweak little things like the player’s gravity and jump speed. The wall jumps also felt too sticky and unsatisfying to players, but minor tweaks managed to fix it.

The game is primarily built for controllers and so the key binds for the keyboard controls need to be adjusted to be more comfortable for PC. This will make combat more enjoyable on keyboard. We also need to make a way to indicate that this is a controller focused game.

Some of the combat animation is still in the works so a temporary text block was used but it’s not great in terms of feedback for players in game and makes it difficult to properly fight. This, however, shouldn’t be a lasting problem because the animations are being made. The falling animation was also a bit buggy since it didn’t work properly at some times. The boss animations were also way too fast and needed to be slowed down.

Our testers also pointed out that the background wall art felt mucky and out of place compared to the character, and so our artists changed it to suit the cleaner art style of the player character.

Another common issue our testers raised was the lack of combat feedback, our play testers didn’t know if they were doing any damage against enemies and or didn’t notice that they themselves were dying. To fix this we are adding colored boarders when the player takes damage and knockback on enemies when the player hits them. Play testers also stated that they felt like the combat was boring. So, we are adding more types of attacks/combos and or a parry/block the players can use and more enemy types.

The inventory system was confusing to our play testers so a tutorial on how to use it and the items will be implemented. It’s either that or we will simply how it works. Also an outline was added behind the items because players didn’t know if they could pick it up.