This week was heavy on playtesting and getting all the features in on time to test!

During playtesting, we’ve noticed that players were skipping the tutorial prompts, and as a result players got stuck because they didn’t know what each track did, or what the controls were. Because of this, we’ve discussed and we’re going to implement a NPC that will show the players how to use each track that they’ve gotten. Hopefully by doing this, players will see what they have to do and so the player won’t need to read the prompts.

The playtesters really liked the non-linearity that we offered the players in the underground level. As a result, we’re tweaking the underground section to involve more sections that allows the player to explore, and to provide them with multiple options for reaching the surface level.  

However, the feedback that we’ve most commonly gotten from players was regarding the controls. While most people did figure out how to switch tracks, the playtesters found it clunky and awkward. The time pause when switching tracks also broke immersion. As a result, we’re moving track switching to use A and S, where players cycle through the list of tracks with those two keys. There is still some doubt as to whether this control scheme is better, as some testers have expressed concern about needing to take their fingers off the jump and context keys to switch tracks. We still believe this new control scheme will be better, but we’ll gather some feedback before making a final decision.

We've also gotten feedback that players never felt like they had to stay in the red track. The playtesters found that they would switch to the red track to break objects, then switch back to either blue or green. To make the players feel like they have a reason to stay within the red track, we've decided to move the wall jump functionality to the red track.

There’s much more in the pipeline for the upcoming demo with Ubisoft this Thursday, such as refining animations, integrating FMOD for better control over the audio, implementing collectibles, and refining the UI. Everyone’s got a lot of work going on, but we'll post again next week with the feedback from Ubisoft and the progress we've made towards the beta!