Hi everyone and welcome to another devlog for The Cardinal Crusade!

On Friday, the 31st of march we released a public demo of The Cardinal Crusade with the purpose of getting feedback on what we have made so far, to find any bugs we may have missed along the way, and to improve on what we have to move forward and deliver the best game possible.

The feedback has been incredible so far! Some minor bugs were found but nothing too serious. From this feedback we can move forward, improve upon our idea and make the final game even better; That’s also what this week’s devlog is about.

First of all, to anyone who has played the game, shared the game and given feedback, thank you! You’ve helped us greatly. To anyone who is yet to play it, the demo isn’t coming down any time soon so please, feel free to try it out!

Now, onto what we have done since the demo.

There were some minor issues outlined by lets players and comments which we patched as fast as possible. The game is now in a stable state with no further issues being reported thus far.

We will now moved onto some of the larger problems we have been working with.

One of the games collectibles, a small idol / bird statue is awarded on each level if you can complete it without getting hurt. We failed to communicate this in the game and thought that players would figure it out by themselves. Long story short, most didn’t. To remedy this, we have made the idols a physical object within levels that the player must pick up. This should hopefully make the idea behind them clearer to the player.

Another minor issue we found was that the latter parts of the tutorial world were very short and having them split up into two different levels broke the pace a bit. The reason for them being separate in the first place was in order to allow the player to replay the level without having to go through the cutscene every time. We have re-merged these parts in order to solve the pacing issue. We also extended the falling level by giving it a kind of part two. We hope this will make the pacing for that level a bit nicer because it’s rather short as is and if you don’t care about coins, not overly challenging.

A lot of the changes we have made are generally invisible to most players. We have been looking into optimizing the game where it is possible in order to make it run faster and better on computers with lower end hardware. We have made some good progress with this. Hopefully we can find and do more over time. With limited computers to test on, performance testing is tricky, but we´ll keep an eye out for it in the future.

This has been a fairly long post so thanks to anyone who have read this far and we hope you will continue to follow us as we develop this game to completion!

~ @NathanAuckett and @Scimitri