This week I opened up alpha 2 testing to external testers. Perhaps a mistake considering I had already written off much of the current set up, but I had already scheduled it to light a fire under my feet so I went through with it anyway.

Things learned:

1. You need to fix your interface and other user experience issues before you should expect any useful feedback on the core game from external testers.

I think this one speaks for itself.

2. At some point you need to decide whether you’re a luck-based party game or a hardcore RPG.

The game started out as a luck-based party game and I’ve been slowly struggling to steer it towards being closer to a proper RPG. Despite the struggle, I haven’t really succeeded at draining the party game out so now I mostly have a game that has complicated mechanics that are at odds with rolling the die and laughing at misfortune. At some point if I can’t get rid of the party game, I need to double back and embrace it by drastically cutting the fat out of the RPG mechanics.

3. The new battle system is bad for newcomers and PvE in general. (But still great for PvP)

I won’t explain the battle system in its entirety, but think “Rock Paper Scissors”. Enemies attack in patterns. As such, it’s radically more difficult to fight an enemy for the first time than subsequent encounters. At first I had intended to reveal complete enemy attack patterns or at least enemy abilities to make it have some semblance of charity to new players. Initial internal testing decided that it was kind of fun to learn enemy patterns the hard way. Seeing easy enemies completely wreck new players for the first 2/3rds of their first session (first learning how the RPS system works, then having to learn enemy patterns) makes me think that was a terribly wrong assessment.

The simple fact of the matter is that Rock Paper Scissors is only fun against humans because there are mind games available (enhanced by the RPG changing the desirability of certain types). My gut says revealing enemy patterns will likely make PvE battles kind of boring (available options become highly limited compared to a system without RPS), but will at least fix the new player disadvantage. Further investigation may be necessary, possibly changing the bonuses granted by Weak/Strong types to be something other than a damage multiplier.

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Meanwhile my struggle against last week’s problems continued. Not a lot of actual progress on them. I think I’d probably rephrase them as, “man the map part of the game sucks”. Ages ago, probably on this very blog, I made the statement that even though the game looks like an overworld it should play more like a dungeon. At some point I lost sight of that and accidentally made an overworld. So I think that’s like the guiding light for this problem, I need to make the map segment of the game start to feel more like a proper dungeon. I haven’t actually come up with much to achieve that, but that’s kind of where it needs to go.

In my mind an “alpha 3” milestone is starting to form. I see it consisting of interface improvements, revising the map systems, improving the way equipment works, and a completely new main quest. I want it done by March. That’s a crazy deadline that I can’t hope to hit until I actually know what the map revisions should even be.