Update: the Finishing Touch

We’re exctited. Are you excited? 🙂

Let me explain what’s going on…

In brief, very soon, we expect to deliver the demo to you.

As for the longer version of the facts… here we go.

How is the Translation Going?

In the previous post I said that we were tryig to give you the demo by the end of September. Now it’s the beginning of November.

We have had some difficulties in finding a good translator and that has caused an important delay.

But finally the translation is done.

We have to do some proof reading and some extra checks to ensure that dialogs are still working properly, but most of the work is done.

More Testing

While waiting for the translation to be completed, we’ve been conducting some additional important tests.

At this point, the bugs aren’t a big concern.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still bugs and you’ll likely encounter quite a few of them when playing the demo. The fact is that, most likely, the bugs you’ll encounter will be small. In fact, some are so small, that only the devs know that it’s a bug.

Considering the (tiny) size of our team, the (small) amount of testers and the (early) development stage of the demo, we see that as a success.

Is it possible that a game-breaking bug pops out while playing the demo?

Yes. Some testers encountered one of those, others didn’t. We’re trying to eliminate as many of them as possible. But to have a full list, we’d need thousands of players testing the game… and that isn’t possible unless we do something like an early access – which, by the way, we’re considering for 2024… but let’s talk about this another time.

Hopefully you won’t encounter any game-breaking bug… but just in case, save the game often and you’re safe. Also, that prevents you from having a “Dark Souls moment”, since BioSynth can be unforgiving at times.

Anyway, let’s move away from bugs because our recent tests were also oriented towards something else… and that is improving the gameplay experience for you.

QoL Improvements

By watching testers play the game, we’ve had the chance to see a number of things that we wanted to improve.

Among those, we identified quite a few quality of life improvements. For example, during the character creation, we highlighted the key attributes for the specific class you picked.

Another example is about the cursor in combat.

Before the recent update, the cursor weren’t that clear during combat. For instance, when equipped with a melee weapon, you saw something like this when an enemy was out of range for your weapon:

This was happening even if you had enough AP to move close to the enemy and to hit it. It was confusing. Now, thanks to “air shapes” you can clearly understand when you can move close to an enemy and attack, and when you can’t.

Gameplay Improvements

Aside from QoL improvements, the tests gave us a glimpse of how we can elevate the gameplay.

A very simple thing is that we added a couple of ladders to speed up your navigation. While we’d love that you take the time to explore the whole area, when you just want to go from point A to point B to progress a quest, it’s right that you can do it without wasting your precious time.

Of course, we got to work on more complex things too…

One of the things that stood out the most is the fact that players continuosly interacted with the quests in unexpected ways. We designed the quests with a lot of possible points of interactions… yet we kept seeing new possibilities.

This made us re-think the quests and give you more freedom.

And, of course, let’s not forget about balancing the game. It’s an ongoing work, but after each iteration, the game looks more balanced.

What To Expect Next

Once the proof reading and dialog check is done, and once we complete some tasks that we thought necessary after the recent gameplay, we’re running a final test.

Such test is going to involve quite a few players and will likely take about a week.

That test will show if we can give you the demo right away or if we need to put a little extra work. Anyway, unless things go horribly wrong, you’ll likely ear from us very soon with good news 🙂

Stay tooned!