Devlog 12: Trials

Back at the start of February, I put out a call on a few discord servers where I regularly hang out for people to privately test the Critias Empire demo.

I am eternally grateful to those who gave their time to play it and give feedback! You've massively helped both from a technical perspective, and also in terms of both inspiration, motivation and helping clarify the path forward for the game.

[h2]Bugs Bugs Bugs - Part 2[/h2]

Just about every player who tried the demo found some bugs. Some really obscure ones floated to the surface, which was great. Perhaps more usefully, a variety of people played the game in ways that are just completely different from how I approach it. This in turn gave me a huge list of small improvements to make to the game. Some things players just didn't understand, whilst other parts of the game that are awkward or fiddly to play, that I've got used to, were made clear to me as not being ready for players.



In particular

• I don't have an ultrawide monitor, but a few testers did, and my "solution" for these screen types proved hopelessly inadequate. I now have a fix that I'm hoping to test very soon.
  
• Tutorial bugs continued to crop up. One especially nasty bug left players unable to rescue their mines and farms after a disaster, and actually gave them the wrong idea about how rescuing was supposed to work
  
• Lots of UI elements still don't update correctly, which is incredibly annoying as a player (if you think you have enough resources to do something, and then the game says "uh actually no, I just forgot to tell you").
  
• The error handling and bug reporting system was the worst offender in terms of me being used to it being slightly broken. A number of errors that don't actually affect the player and are more reminders for me, that should have been handled silently, interrupted the player and made the game seem way more error prone and buggy than it is. As well, my bug reporting system didn't quite report enough information for me to diagnose some of the really critical game breaking bugs, which is disappointing to say the least.
  

[h2]Foggy Horizons[/h2]

In feedback, Surveying came top of the list of half-baked features. I nearly didn't include it in the demo, but leaving it out would open up a big hole in the end-game. It's essential to the idea of resources refreshing and the player going from seeing disasters as purely negative, to seeing them as an opportunity to find new sources of rare gold and marble.



I have improved the usability of surveys, adding in some small quality of life features to make it a bit more usable. The biggest problem now however is that it's badly balanced. Surveying is (rightly) expensive, but the rewards simply do not match that. And the random nature makes it feel completely random and arbitrary. There's not much thought in surveying, which is no fun.

I plan to tackle this in two ways:

- Rewards for "failed" surveys.
- Clues on where actual useful results might be. I want players to be able to sniff out the valuable resources they want, or get a hint that what they're looking for just isn't there right now.

Hopefully I'll be able to talk more about this more in the next update.

[h2]Decisions[/h2]

Last month I teased a new way of interacting with the Gods, which I'm calling "Decisions". The general principle is that player actions don't directly affect God anger and patience, but instead have a chance to trigger a "decision". When triggered, the player is given a short scenario / story about what the Gods have been up to and think of the player's actions. The player is then given a couple of choices of how to react. Each choice has a chance for different good and bad outcomes. These outcomes in turn drive God anger and patience, which ultimately leads to disasters. Or maybe the Gods give rewards, making them no longer exclusively negative actors. Or even one God gives a gift and another gets super angry!

I think it'll make for a much more immersive way of interacting with the Gods, and bring the Gods closer to the aim of being a bit of a mysterious puzzle for players to have fun figuring out. Plus it should long term allow for fun things like playing Gods off against each other, sucking up to one God in particular, or manipulating the Gods into making "favourable" disasters.

[h2]What's Next?[/h2]

I've not had time to work on Decisions yet, but I'm convinced from talking to players testing the demo that it's the right way to go. I have applied to be in a Steam event in early April and if I'm accepted, then my aim will be to have Decisions in the demo, and the demo ready in time for the festival.

it will be tight, considering I am also now working on two further small games (which you can find here and here for those interested). Work on them is going well, but as with game development, there's never enough time for everything.

I've also not had any feedback from the publishers I contacted at the end of January. Partly I've been slow to chase them up, but I know some of them did play the demo (going by the in-game analytics), so if they were really interested, I think I would know by now.

So for now I'm going to continue working on the basis I won't have a publisher. That means taking part in Steam NextFest in June. As well, I now have a release date in mind, though I still need to finalise a few things before announcing exactly when.

Consequently, the game will initially release with fewer Gods, disasters and Tenets (features/systems). However, the feedback from the demo so far is that there's plenty to keep players entertained just with what is currently in the game. And nothing is getting cut. Those planned Gods, disasters and Tenets will simply move to being post-launch updates.

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, you can always contact me or leave a comment!