Valley of Shadow Devlog #5
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Hello again! Sorry about the hiatus last month, but not too sorry… I’d rather skip a month than try to push out a mostly-empty devlog just because. At any rate, it’s the end of August, and here’s what we’ve been up to:
Demo & Beta Feedback
Fleshing out Story
Steam Page Improvements
Demo & Beta Feedback
At the end of July, we got some incredible feedback in our discord on both the publicly-available demo and the Force Beta. It was thought provoking, and the primary driver of a lot of new design work over the past month. Actual development is now more-or-less on hold while we flesh out the design changes, which will affect the entire game from start to end.
For the public Light demo, which we're still very happy with, we are considering changing the mechanic's introduction. The puzzles are already solid, but the sheer power of getting the Staff and the Light Spell could be pushed even further by starting with a few "static" puzzles. The beginning puzzles would have static Lights in them, and the player would have to either manipulate the environment, or manipulate the Light in a rudimentary manner, in order to solve them. After a few puzzles, the player would *then* get the Staff, and be able to place the Light wherever they want. If done correctly, it could be a huge leap in the player's capabilities, and a really powerful effect.
The Force Beta resulted in several small bugs and design issues, but the primary one is what I like to call a lack of readability. Timing & pathfinding are a huge aspect of the Force puzzles. Right now, however, it is difficult to determine a path ahead of time, and to remember what path a missile has taken after shooting it. On top of that, due to the travel time of the missiles, experimentation on puzzles is pretty slow. You have to target the sensors, release the spell, wait for the missiles to hit all their targets, then wait for the cooldown. All in all this could be a 5-10 second delay between experiments, which isn't huge, but coupled with lack of readability is a big concern. We have a couple of ideas for solving this; the two lead contenders are drawing a thin line between missiles and their destinations as you hold in the spell, or otherwise highlighting the area that the missile is going to go through (with some kind of emissive texture). Either one will be difficult technically, as the pathfinding will have to update in real-time constantly. But the pathfinding is already decently optimized (primarily by node reduction) so this shouldn't be a huge hurdle.
Fleshing out Story
Far and away, the most important feedback we received was on the story. This was the first time we've gotten actual critical feedback on it. We've shown the game to a lot of people - both personal friends and hundreds of people at conventions - but never received straight critical story feedback until now. It's similar with the puzzles, but the difference is that puzzle solutions (and failures) are visible while playing the game, understanding the story is not. So I could iterate on the puzzles just from watching people play them, but we couldn't really do the same with the story.
The primary issue with the story is lack of clarity around how things interconnect. As you play the game, you're collecting photos, floppy disks, VHS's and some game cartridges... but why? What do these mean, what's the point of them? It was unclear, but every one of these mementos was actually populating the home, which you don't wake up in until about an hour into the game. That's not the only problem; the home is a huge part of the game, and where the bulk of the story is actually delivered, but you don't end up there for quite some time. And when you finally do, you don't spend very long there before you're on to the next Vault.
So, we are introducing the home much sooner, more frequently, and for longer stretches of time. We are pulling the home straight to the forefront of the game; we want the player to encounter it within the first 15 minutes of the game or so. And then they return 20 minutes later, and 20 minutes after that. This gives us ample opportunities to further the story each time they return, and it lets them gauge their progress a bit as they work through the home. This also has the (arguably more important) benefit of forcing us to actually flesh the story out, and work on the pacing and story beats. Until now, the story has largely lived in Anthony's head, and has been missing some key details. Those details are finally making themselves known, in a handy dandy Google Doc.
Steam Page Improvements
Alongside all of the new design work, I've also worked on improving the Steam page. After taking Chris Zukowski's class on How To Make A Steam Page, I realized just how off a lot of our Steam page was. So I've spent a bunch of time collecting new screenshots, capturing gifs for the About This Game section, and updating the text across the entire page.
When Anthony was visiting a few months ago, we decided on the four pillars of the game: Puzzles, Exploration, Mementos, & Story. I have tried to keep these four pillars in mind as I've updated everything. Each of the four first screenshots is now tied to one of the pillars. The short description points all four of them out. The About This Game gifs are a slight exception, in that they don't showcase exploration - primarily because that's difficult to portray in gifs, but also because I really wanted to show off all three spells.
Creating the gifs was particularly time consuming. Not only did I have to get a good shot of each aspect of the game, I then spent an inordinate amount of time cutting them to the perfect lengths and then optimizing them like crazy via ezgif. Keeping the page as small as possible was crucial, because over a certain threshold I've read that Steam flags you, or will just remove the gifs altogether. Fortunately I have a webdev background, so this was actually a pretty fun exercise for me. And I am very happy with how they turned out.
There still are improvements to be made, primarily the Capsule art. I want it completely redone, likely by a professional artist. That will be a huge next step, however, and before doing that we want to flesh out the story so we know what to actually put in the capsule! I’d also love a new trailer at some point, though the current one isn’t terrible so that will end up being one of the last things we improve.
And yes, before you ask, I did reuse all of the new Steam assets for this devlog. Like I said, they took a while to make...
That’s it for this month! Hopefully next devlog I’ll have more new actually-implemented content to show you. No promises though, because we definitely don’t want to skimp on design.