HELLO EVERYONE!

It's been awhile since my last post and lots and little happened all at the same time. First of all, I moved! I moved into a new place and now have my own dedicated office which has taken me awhile to fully set up and get comfortable in. Not only that but I recently had playtesting for the game, and did some re-thinking of some aspects of the game as well, and some major overhauls to the game in its entirety. This post will go over all that I learned from the tests, what changes I've made to the game, and changes going forward and my plans for launch!

• Thoughts after the playtest.

I held private playtesting in my Discord server and those who played the game enjoyed individual aspects of the game, like the story, and specific areas like the pinball tower. However, they felt very disconnected from many parts of the game and were often left confused by controls and unfinished parts. I knew this would be the case mainly because....a lot of the stuff is unfinished and the controls are still placeholder in some cases, and poorly explained. The big parts of the game that people did enjoy were the parts I focused on the most though which is GREAT. They liked what little they saw of the story, and enjoyed exploring and collecting candy. I am super happy to see that because the story and the collecting are the main parts of the game I want to get right the most.

• MY thoughts after the playtest.

The playtest was great because it helped me feel confident in parts of the game I spent time on, and it showed me a lot of areas where I totally missed something, or I designed a part of the level incorrectly. One of the key takeaways I had from the playtest was that rolling was BROKEN. I had known of a few issues with rolling but the issues people found were very easy to do, and very easily broke the game.
[Rolling has been fixed and there currently aren't any issues I have found with it.]

• New save system (this is very cool for me)

I am not the greatest programmer of all time. I'm actually not that great at it at all. I am good enough to make stuff that works and doesn't lag but I am not the best at making things that are extremely easy to work with. One of the things I am not great at is saving and loading stuff. The system I have used for my games was a system that required a lot of things happening and could easily break. BUT I have gotten a new professional save and load system made by actual smart people and am moving all the saving and loading into the new system. WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE PLAYERS? Well I can make the game a lot quicker, and I can do more things much easier. For example, I could only have candy in the main area of the game and not in any of the towers. This kinda sucked because I wanted to have candy in each tower but the way the system was created didn't allow for that easily and any solution I came up with would have taken forever to make and would be annoying to work with too. In less than 30 minutes I moved the candy system over to the new saving and even made it work with all areas of the game EASILY. This will not only help me make the game quicker but will also allow me to do extra things. HECK YEAH

• Release plans

This game has taken WAY longer than I originally intended. I was actually trying to make the game in a month but it ended up taking much, much longer than I wanted. I don't want to keep working on this game for too much longer because I still have my main game that I need to make and this game is currently just taking up time away from my main project. SO I am changing the game to be much shorter story wise, but filling the world with different things to collect and secrets so the main game will be quite short but include goofy side content. Right now the thing that's taking the longest is the real life video segments which include a lot of planning and setup so it fits properly into the story, and make sense and has the right feel. I'm currently trying to think how to achieve them properly or if I need to at all. But that's just where I am at with it. I would LOVE to release the game within a month or so though.

THAT'S IT.
This might not have been the most interesting update, but I am still working on the game. More now than I have the last month or so but things are still happening! Thanks so much for reading

Happy hunting,

-Fairlii