TechDebt Devlog 0.0.50

The first round of playtesting for Tech Debt has completed, and wow was it brutal.

For the most part, playtesters understood the game and gave positive feedback, but one playtester in particular got lost in the tutorial for 45 minutes; something I would not have thought possible.

As it turns out, some gamers do not have a basic understanding about how the internet works, much less how network packets behave. In hindsight, I should not have made this assumption.

In response to this brutal but still somewhat valuable feedback, I added a bunch of U.I. upgrades that really spell things out for the player.

Because I want to make this game accessible to a wider audience, I need to add a bit more story around why you, the players, are here and some more education on the very basics of how the internet works and how that translates to the game.

Throughout the project, I think I have been pretty ruthless with not allowing the scope of this to grow; in fact, I have cut some things that were in my original design.

With that said, in game development there is a phrase that really rings true: “The last 10% of the work takes up another 90% of the time”.

My goal is to have a public demo up by the end of the quarter, but with each round of playtests it feels like I am further from the finish line.

To keep myself inspired, I have been listening to biographies of famous game devs, and it seems that they all have one thing in common: Shipping a game requires a lot of grinding to get it to the finish line, so wish me luck.

If you want to be a playtester, shoot me a message, and I will get you some keys. Any and all feedback is really valuable.