Demo
In the last couple of weeks things have gotten busy with many people playing our game since we released a demo of it. To see lots of people play the game has proven invaluable to us, since we have been able to observe certain patterns of unknown issues and balancing, we hadn’t thought of before. It is always nerve-wracking seeing someone upload a video playing our game, mostly to see what they think of the gameplay and if they are enjoying it or not. But so far, the reception has been good overall with the people playing it seeming to have fun. Saying this we have also picked up on a few things we’ve had some comments about and that we are working on to try and improve.
You can download the demo here: https://gamejolt.com/games/something-ate-my-alien/479495
Something
When you enter battle mode with the bosses, they will circle around you in different patterns where you could get eaten if you are too close to their mouths. The range of getting eaten seems to make players feel out of control so we are working on minimizing this area. There was also frustration with the insta-death situation we’ve got going on in these battles in that when you get eaten, it all ends rather quickly, and you have to start the battle all over again from scratch. We are implementing a few things here to ease this frustration with one of these things being that you can’t get eaten once only the head remains.
Level difficulty
We’ve only done some basic balancing with the different level difficulties so far, but we got some good pointers from one player who played the demo on the hardest level. Instead of just increasing the shield of each enemy we are going to make them give out higher damage as well (with some bigger shields left, but not as steep). This will also solve the issue we have with the Oyse enemy where it multiplies unless you kill it quickly enough, which was basically impossible in the current state.
Tweaking upgrades
We’ve been observing how players feel about the upgrades and when during the gameplay they can build them. So far they seem fairly well balanced, but we are looking into whether you could get the Danger scanner earlier in game than currently, and also if the mining upgrades needs to be slightly stronger then they appear at the moment.
Polishing and bug fixing
Though very stable, there are still some bugs that pops up every now and then, especially now when lots of different people are playing the demo on different machines and set-ups. Rob is working hard on ironing out these last things so that the game will be as bug free as possible when fully released.
Lastly Kat is still polishing certain areas of the game where some art and design details are needed such as some of the enemy animations, cleaning up some images for backgrounds and story-sequences, and going through all the text that appears either as information or dialog in the game. This is an ongoing thing since it changes every now and then as we are altering smaller content or things that appears during gameplay.
Youtube
Our Youtube channel is slowly growing and we have uploaded some content on it over the last year or so. If interested in seeing our video stuff and perhaps some gameplay videos in the near future, head over there and follow us: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOelxidLDP5X0oDGrNIj0OQ
Steam Wish List
And as usual, if you think this is a game you would enjoy we would be very happy if you would also Wish List us over on Steam.
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