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Ian talks about PAX and the work that's been done since.

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Hey everyone, Ian here!

Man, PAX West was a lot of fun! We had a bunch of people stop by and try the game out, and we got lots of great feedback. I think we learned a lot about what people are enjoying about the game, and what's getting in the way of that, and overall I'm very pleased with how it was received.

Players did pretty well with the combat in the game once they learned the basic controls and started experimenting and learning how the different enemies behaved. Around 20% of the people who played were able to defeat or almost defeat the first boss, on a first or second attempt and I think that's a pretty good percentage. We're definitely trying to make a game that the player must learn and adapt to, bringing different strategies to different enemy types.

As I mention in the video, one of the most obvious additions we had to make to the game is the ability to click and drag to move/equip items. Before now the player had to click to pick up an item on to the cursor, and then click again to drop it off the cursor, which works, but is a little less intuitive.

The tutorial also became a point of focus, as people seemed to completely ignore the original sign layout. They were originally just kind of placed at random points in the starting area, with no real directing the player to each of them. Now the tutorial is more linear, which can be seen as a negative, but it can be run through, or skipped through in about 25 seconds, and rewards the player with a few items and a free experience level. The tutorial is now more comprehensive as well, explaining things like leveling, abilities, equipping, and mana better. In the future we may disable the "forced" tutorial once a player reaches a certain point in the game, but I also kind of like the idea of always leaving it in, in case a player comes back to the game after not playing it for awhile. (Thoughts on this appreciated!)

Recently Ben's also been making strides with the player movement system, I think it's one element of the game which has improved a lot since the beginning. Now feeling a lot more polished than when we started with the default Unity FPS prefab.

The future of the game is looking good, and we're getting antsy to release it to the questing masses!

-Ian

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