Helpful Player Feedback

For the past several months I've been working on Godot 4 upgrade, core movement changes, direction of the game, bosses, and early polish of the game to solidify a design. 

1. Godot 4 upgrade: Failure then success after several betas: I knew that my game wouldn't be done anytime soon based on how much content I want in the game (hopefully a reasonable amount of content for a solo developer) because of this I felt it would be reasonable to start my Godot 4 upgrade early. I spent about a week and half upgrading when Godot 4 beta 1 was released and it/I wasn't ready. One, I didn't have enough knowledge of everything that changed to start this. Two, Godot 4 just wasn't stable enough and there were so many bugs that it made development too difficult. I ended up throwing away the week and half amount of work to continue building future features like new enemies and abilities. 

Fast forward several months when Godot 4 beta 10 was released things became more stable (plenty of bugs but still) and I attempted to upgrade again. It took me about one week to get things "stable" but only because I learned from my mistakes from last attempt. If you're interested in all the steps in detail or any specific questions feel free to reach out or leave a comment and ask.

2. Core movement and level design changes: Originally, I liked the player movement until I started I got some feedback saying “the movement feels floaty”. My first thought was “well it is a bat… so yeah” while that isn’t wrong it doesn’t mean it’s right for the player experience experience. This is where I started to realize what my game was missing and what it should be. The game has always been something that encourages speed running but it never really felt fast, it was focused on just not making mistakes, which in my opinion can get boring. I started to focus my efforts on making the movement snappier, faster, and just more fun (hopefully). After that I redesigned pretty much all levels, focusing on making a less steep difficulty curve. I realized the most obvious thing far to late, you get really good at your own game so every level was easy for me but not the people I watched play it. I still I have a long way to go before I’m satisfied with my level design but it’s a good first step.

3. Bosses: Something I never thought I would consider was adding bosses but I wanted there to be some sort of end goal per section which turned out to be a really good decision. It added more character to the game as well as twice the amount of work but still. The current boss still needs some work for it to be considered “complete” but it’s a start. I won’t discuss the boss in detail to not ruin it for new players but just know it’s a work in progress.

4. How to polish: As someone who is new to game development, polish is something that I’m not great at, mostly due to my own goal (stubbornness) to do everything myself. Between the art, sound design, and music (still working on that) all things I’m doing for the first time, it’s difficult to get things to the level I want them. That being said, I’m being pretty patient with the process and I’d say it’s better then how it started. I’ve learned a lot about polish just by watching RedCabinGames (developer of Space Scavenger) so follow them if you aren’t already!

5. Thank you I definitely would not have gotten this far without streaming on twitch (GrumbleOfPugz) I’ve been very lucky and fortunate to have such a nice and helpful community. So thank you to all of twitch chat for helping me with all my questions (which is a lot), testing my game, giving feedback, and of course just hanging out. I appreciate all of you so thank you! 

Development will continue! Steam page coming soon ;)