Zofia News

A few weeks ago we sent out about a dozen private beta keys to start gathering some feedback for the project. This seemed like a good time to get thoughts on the current direction and the best steps to move forward.

I feel its also relevant to note that this is the first (?) private beta we've ran, so I feel we stumbled on a few steps, but all in all it worked. The beta included roughly 20% of the game, but had enough of the core mechanics to have a strong idea for how the remainder of the game worked.

We've done a lot of review of the feedback and it's given us quite a bit to think about.

In no particular order, here are some various observations from our notes:

Originally we had a lot of manually piloting the airship around. While a neat novelty, it became kind of a chore, and left other players in co-op with not much to do.

We're considering making the airship more of a 'safe house' that you can access whenever you need it in certain levels, and potentially be able to pilot it around in areas (where it would make sense).

Keeping the deck cluttered with stuff is cool right...?

Every single beta tester we got feedback from struggled with the combat difficulty.

We've concluded there are several reasons for this that were external to the actual AI: UI Feedback, level design, the player's animations, and the lack of a proper combat tutorial.

That being said, I'm looking at making weaker variants of the current enemy types to create a better learning curve. Fortunately this private beta didn't have any of the bosses, which may have been way more problematic.

Simple ghost who lobs magic, or the harbinger of death?

On the up side, a lot of players found they liked the grapple hook. Some so much so that they effectively stopped walking altogether.

There are a handful of tools you can equip to your left arm, but at the minute none of them really quite measure up with the grapple hook. I predict this might lead to some problems down the road so I think its a good time to reevaluate the other tools.

Not shown: Swinging into this tree.

There is a lot of thoughts on the UI - which I think at this point needs an overhaul as well as some notable changes. I don't think I am going to discuss that at the minute as that may need to be its own topic.

Lastly, we've still been overhauling the art style. This is definitely incomplete but I think the vibe is probably going to stay the same:





Thanks for reading.

First things first, the team has grown somewhat. We have brought on:

- Adrian as a 3D artist.
- Josh as an art director and level designer.
- Hampus as a composer.

This has had some unusual side effects...

Adrian has taken up the daunting task of overhauling the art. Since we are already somewhat late into development, you'll likely see a slow transition from my simple art style to a much more cohesive one. I'm currently undecided, but its possible we'll have at least one beta(?) build with a mixed and/or incomplete art style.



Similarly, each level is undergoing an overhaul as well. Josh will be redoing/finishing the main chapters. We're also adding some optional challenges and mini-dungeons but its really too early to say how many of these there will actually be, and how extensive they will be.

A lot of these are challenges we thought it would be fun to add or areas that didn't quite make it into other levels.



Combat changes!

We've run into some unusual balance problems that kind of go into the core of our stat system. I'd love to go into a lot of depth over the flaws, but that might be too much for this particular article.

To summarize, the player was too fast, and once you hit certain combat levels, gained far too much of an advantage over most enemies. Unfortunately for the stats, this means a good deal will need to be reworked, but it will be all for the better in the long run.

Combat is still being tweaked but here is a small clip of it if you're interested:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Unfortunately we're going to push everything further back until some of these overhauls are in a better state. I personally have several things on my to-do list that I really want polished up and/or fixed before the project sees any public beta or early access status.

The weeks leading up into the holidays always get kind of crazy. I actually intended to have an update sometime during the first week of November but that just did not pan out.

So what's the current status of the game?

Well technically playable. Single player works, and splitscreen (+ Steam Remote Play) work but not without some issues. Admittedly the online play via Steam has given us some unusual issues which has been a lot of our focus right now.

Some quirky issues came up that we didn't anticipate but we probably should have.

Originally, during dialogue, you would select what you want to say to an NPC and they would immediately reply. Well we added a step in-between where your character actually asks the question.



This is entirely for other players who may be listening into the conversation. This doesn't add much to single player other than having the character slightly expand on the question/answer when they state it.

The original character editor, although interesting, wasn't quite the right tone, so we went with something much more traditional.



Admittedly the editor is pretty basic right now and eventually should have more, but it's been an usual design issue/challenge for both online play and splitscreen, and needs to work 100% before we do much else to it.

After we get Steam online (and a couple of notable bugs) hammered out, we're going to send out a handful of Alpha keys for largely performance and some bug squashing. How we are going to choose the testers, I'm really not sure.

Once things seems to be functional online and local, and some rough edges smoothed out, I think we'll be set for early access, which will be largely focusing on adding content.

We got a lot of feedback from demoing the project and having anyone who wanted to come up and play it. There were definitely bugs that are being ironed out so I won't talk about those, but I will write about some notable topics people brought up, as well as observations from me.



Level design:
This one is 100% on me. I created this coastal city with some winding paths, bridges, and shortcuts. As you progress through the level, you slowly fight new varieties and larger numbers of enemies. A player progressing normally will have decent equipment and few levels to deal with the challenge.

What I did not expect was players to take windy side routes and avoid most conflicts and gear, resulting in them getting into difficult fights with little to no gear.

Respawning:
Throughout the level was about 4-5 of these 'markers'.


They are the equivalent of 'check points' in that you respawn at them, but you need to walk up and touch them to activate them. Most players skipped these entirely. My theory is that don't look particularly interesting so it was easy to skip.

Another idea would be to have them auto-activate if you get near them. Maybe an NPC can point them out but that feels cheap.

Regardless this system will definitely get tuned up.

Art:
I got some praise and some confusion on the art style. Players generally seemed to like the simpler style as it was pretty easy to tell what's going on. What was not liked was a lot of items use the same color palettes as other objects, making some items fairly difficult to see if you weren't looking directly at it.

This was amplified by the fact some items are hard to aim at and pick up, due to them being small or oddly shaped.

This should be pretty easily fixable.

Other:

• As it stands the inventory 'book' system is a little too slow to use and will likely be getting some slight design changes.
  
• Several players asked for more destructible objects and things to interact with. Specifically, brute forcing doors.
  
• Wall jumping works on some objects that it probably shouldn't work on, which was more confusing to players than anything.
  
• The player's death animation takes too long. This is actually a bug, but the AI adds insult to injury and will kick you on the ground as you die and that came off as kind of mean.
  

There are other minor gameplay and UI elements we're going to re-evaluate or refine, though most of the core elements I believe will stay the same. That being said I was hoping to prepare for an early access or beta release as the next major thing post-expo, but I don't think the game is quite there yet.

We have been invited to showcase our game at the Name Your Game Expo in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Should you happen to be in the area October 5th/6th, you should swing by and check out what we got.

(If all goes according to plan 😬) We'll be showcasing splitscreen and one of the newer areas for anyone to play, as well as a newer trailer we'll be showing and uploading here to Steam.



This is our first expo so it will be a rough build, but there will be a follow-up post here as well as discussion over feedback on our Discord...

Which is to note, we're also finally opening up a Discord server. Feel free to join us here: https://discord.gg/sFDJZ7R