Non VR Improvements, Streaming?, Playtest Post Mortem - Devlog 02/06

It's been a busy week, with the fifth playtest bugfixes taking up most of my time. I managed to get quite a lot fixed during the weekend, with plenty more bugs reported to look at over the next couple weeks. It looks like the major physics bugs which made stealing large heavy objects easy are resolved now, which sets the stage for new gear items to make it more of a fun challenge.

Non-VR improvements

I also got some of the long-needed quality-of-life improvements done for the non VR mode done this week. The biggest one being held object rotation, to make it less of a hassle to manoeuvre larger objects through doorways. This has been a much-anticipated improvement for PC mode, but finding a good way to do it has been tricky.

Some games use a keyboard modifier + mouse movement for this kind of thing, but I find that can be unintuitive and only allows for movement on 2 axes anyway. A full 3 axis keyboard option is probably easier to use, but more fiddly. For now, I've decided to only give PC players the ability to "roll" two handed objects using Q and E. I've found that even just this 1 axis of rotation makes it substantially easier to manipulate objects in non VR mode, while remaining easy to understand and use

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The arms intersect a bit but it's good enough for now. I may make the hands reposition themselves on the object as it rotates in future. I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts on this system next playtest. I might need to implement an advanced mode or something if some players feel like they still need more control over objects, but we'll see how this works out.

I've also finally given non VR players the option to smash things with the hammer without throwing it, which should make "break $n" goals easier to achieve. Or just enable rampages of destruction. I've been working on improving the way breakables work too, after which I'm going to make a bunch more objects breakable.

Here's a sneak peek of a new gear item too 👀 The wrench can be used to detach stealables which are attached to the walls, roof, ceiling, etc. Just give the object a good whack and it'll come right off without damage.

Streaming?

I quite enjoyed the pre-playtest Q&A livestream I did last week, so I'm considering doing more dev streams every now and then. There are some game dev tasks like level creation and making breakables which can get a little boring to do all day, but I think they'd make for interesting streams to fans of the game.

It'd also make the process a little more enjoyable for me, and maybe chat feedback would help me come up with ideas for new room varieties or something. I'll probably try a stream on the weekend, so look out in the discord for info on that when it comes if you're interested!

Playtest 5 Post Mortem

It's kind of amazing that this was already the fifth playtest! I think the game has come a long way since the very first one last year, and hopefully the next test will be even better (and less buggy)

Steam is not feeling like giving me detailed stats today for some reason, so I can't go into the full metrics but in terms of numbers this test resulted in around 700 wishlists, and nearly 300 new discord members. I think we had a drop in players from the last playtest, mainly because there was no 800k views tik tok post this time around, but it's interesting to see how many players I can muster just from the discord. A lot of the new members came from people inviting friends which is great to see.

This playtest was a little buggier than I'd hoped, mostly due to the new level selection system changing a lot of the load logic and resulting in a few broken state black screen bugs. Robustness is something I'm hoping to improve for the next playtest.

Speaking of the next playtest, I have reason to believe it could be a very good one. There may be a lot of fresh eyes on the game, so hopefully we'll set a new record for number of players to beat playtest 4. I can't give the details just yet, but stay tuned 👀