Level Selection and New Intel - Devlog 12/03

Most of my time since the last update has been spent on managing the playtest, fixing bugs and putting out hotfixes to some of the major issues people encountered.

Playtest Post-Mortem

The fourth playtest has been the most successful so far, even overtaking the October Steam Next Fest demo in terms of players, wishlists and new discord members. Over 2000 people joined the discord server during the test, and we're quickly approaching the big 10k members milestone!

Steam wishlists have also seen a healthy increase, here's a graph for those interested in metrics. The largest spike actually occurred right after the playtest ended, mostly driven by a tik tok video made by a VR creator which went viral.

Level Selection

The level selection system has been in a demo form for a long time now, only giving the player the option to select between "House" and "Bungalow", without showing what the level looks like until the player actually loads into it.

This week I finally started on a proper level selection system, redesigning the intel board completely. It's still in a proof-of-concept phase, but let me know what you think of the new design.

Three missions will be generated and displayed on the board, with some information about the potential profits, risk, and ease of entry, as well as some hints on possible high value targets and things to look out for. 

Pictures will also be provided, so players can make their own decisions on which mission to tackle next. You can zoom in on the mission packs and photos to get a closer look at them. The pictures in this gif have been automatically generated from the level, but the text is all placeholder for now.

Some of the provided pictures will be slightly useless of course, but that just adds a whole new layer to the game in trying to plan a heist based on fuzzy, hastily taken photographs.

I am considering adding the ability to upgrade the intel team in future, so that higher quality - or even night-vision - photographs will be given instead to give players a better idea of what they're doing. More photos will probably be needed if larger missions are added.

This new level selection UX will be vital in the next playtest, where there will be at least 3 levels to choose from. Look out for a patron poll soon to decide on the next level to be added!