So, it's been about five months since Test Build 01 was released. I figured now would be a good time to make a post like this to indicate I am still working on Runecrossed, even if it can be a bit slow going at times.

Lessons from Test Build 01

When I released Test Build 01, I was more interested to hear what was wrong with the game than what it did right, and with the detailed feedback of a few individuals who were kind enough to play it and detail their thoughts, I found a lot of areas I can improve things going forward.

Confusing Level Design.

The original Horizon Falls tried to be way too much at once - something that can be sped through, or extensively explored. As well as something that can "acceptably" be traversed by three characters who all have their own unique forms of movement and approaches to combat.

This was a good idea on paper, providing something to suit the approaches of various types of players and being the one environment in the build to test out all three characters, but in practice, this is what lead to its cluttered and unclear sense of progression.

Levels in the future should be divided into types. Linear goal-based levels that greatly tone back on the side paths, and open exploration-based levels that lack a specific location-based goal to reach. Levels will also be specialized for individual characters, so setups can make more unique use of their movesets and abilities without worrying about how it would be for the other two.

Hard to Learn.

An inevitable issue of releasing a build before it has an actual interactive tutorial - the game is just kind of hard to figure out. The controls / abilities list is a lot of dry reading and is hard to approach to people who just want to get into the game (most players, I imagine), and still leaves a lot of the actual utility of many moves unclear.

The obvious solution to this is to prioritize making actual tutorial areas where players can learn character abilities and find out what they're actually for by experience. Ideally, tutorialization that isn't a slog to get through.

Some Moves Felt Useless.

Between the three playable characters, a lot of their abilities felt unnecessary or outright useless. This is in part due to the lack of explanation of what they're meant for, but also falls on the level and enemy design.

Going forward, I hope to carefully consider every single move and its possible applications, and ideally create setups and enemies that make use of each of them so nothing feels underutilized or tacked-on, and likely adjusting the moves themselves to various degrees.

Other Things.

This probably goes without saying, but the things listed above aren't the only issues with the game in this incredibly early state. There are various other bugs and things that still don't feel very great to do in the game that I will be fixing along the way.

If there's anything that particularly bugs you about the game that I have yet to directly address, feel free to point it out and I'll likely bump it up my priorities list!

The Road to Test Build 02

My goal with Test Build 02 is to address these issues as above and, ideally, refine the game's early state into something with more of a focus and clear vision. The current plan is to gradually do this across three main "sub-versions," one for each character.

These sub-versions will include, for the relevant character, a brand new level built around their moveset, a proper interactive tutorial to learn how to play as them, and updated models and animations, each with the intent of fleshing out what is unique about the characters' various gameplay styles and better figuring out the game's overall identity.

Here's a video showing a few clips of how the Atien revision is going. (Please do note that everything is in a very early state and the level is currently more focused on physical layout than looking good.)