Quick note after playing L1 again. Paused the game with “p” and noticed that key presses during pause will register all at once after unpausing. So you can pause, mash “s,” unpause, and go flying into the air with a super jump.

Honestly, I only think we need 10 good testers who have the time and are capable of writing a coherent sentence. We didn’t have _that_ many good testers on Dinowaurs, but the feedback we got was still super important. Getting a bug report of “froze on load” is worthless unless the submitter is capable of working with us to find the root cause.

Its funny you mention exploration too, I’m sorta building a level 1 version 2 and I’m focusing the whole thing just on environmental exploration and storytelling. There’s no real challenge except for jumping and no threat of death, allowing for the player to just kind of soak up the basic controls and the atmosphere of the level. I’m super pumped about this direction, hopefully it’ll be playable soon so we can get more feeds back.

Beyond that, that also may be due to the fact we don’t have many standalone games under out belt (really only 1). Perhaps once Liferaft comes out we’ll get enough people talking about the game and the variety of things they liked/dislike about it and that’ll be a springboard to get a larger community together.

That said, the community at that point is a game enthusiasts community, not necessarily conducive to game testers. That’s a special breed (and I mean that in the best way possible).

“We don’t have a gauntlet to stock with dozens of testers nor the time to build or even manage one. ”

It’s funny that you say something like that. It’s always been an idea of mine to try to build a forum community based on alpha/beta testers, with divisions such as Open/Closed Betas, indie/professional, etc. Would have a system for reviewing and bugfinding, and a hierarchy of sorts for reputation/skill. Devs come to the forum and file their game under a level of needed testing, from open to exclusive…

Right, I’m getting carried away.

In regards to Level 1, the first time I played it I found myself extremely lost, having difficulty with the maneuvers and even basic combat. Suffice to say, I lost interest fairly quickly. The game was beautiful, however, so I set out to explore rather than achieve any objective (if there is one). The exploration was very enjoyable, until the inevitable death that happened frequently (due to my aforementioned lack of skill).

I’ll go try playing again, with this blog post in mind. Good luck!

Out of this World comes to mind as an uncompromisingly dramatic game from start to finish, but it was also very frustrating and repetitive because you kept dying and replaying the same level, there was no hand-holding. Games back then weren’t too concerned about giving the player a lot of negative experiences.

Hooray for retro-styled games with modern ideas about ideal player experience.