Hey everyone,

firstly, I appreciate all the feedback. Good or bad, feedback is feedback. I’ve loved seeing people enjoy and hate my game, it’s driving me to creative places I haven’t been at before and it is beautiful. i thank you all 🙏🏽

When I began digesting all the survey responses, I started to become defensive towards the criticism. It was a beautiful process to accept the flaws of my creation but even more so to want to take action based on it.

I’ve spent the last week compiling a catalog of issues and bugs that were mentioned from the feedback.

The most common mention was regarding Health and Stamina regeneration. Admittedly, there is already existing boosts within the game but were only accessible if a player reached the difficulty level (DL) of 5. The highest DL from all surveys was 4.8, although extremely close, it doesn’t quite reach the boosts accessibility.

Summary: 

• Fix monsters to stop hurting themselves on obstacles (ie. money bags, lampposts)
• Adjust accessibility of Health Regen
• Adjust accessibility of Stamina Regen
• Recover money and/or items when player(s) dies 
• Adjust monsters: attack, defence and movements.
• Elaborate story/objective. Make it clear.
• Update user interface to feature damage counters, indicators and counters for coins, kills and deaths. 
• Rebalance difficulty (quantity of monsters) and hide all monsters when skeletons come out at night. 

Operations subject to Change:

• Stranger interaction: in the alpha version it felt extremely basic and forced. Nothing natural or purposeful. An opportunity to sell weapons or equipment would be useful. Perhaps the Stranger would move around or setup shop in a building? The changes we are making to this are undecided at this time but is being discussed. 
• Death, Weapons, Gold/Loot: the original concept was for monsters to drop coins when they died. This concept is being looked at. We are also looking at what players drop when they die. Looting all dead bodies may be a feature in the foreseeable future. 
• Platform compatibility: at the moment, it’s only functional for Windows. I’m planning to open it up to other platforms before the beta launches. 
• User Interface: evaluating design and reimplementing better usability and functionality. Tween effects for stats bar(s). Help info (via H key). Many ideas, many discussions. 
• Cutscenes: Intro definitely, but I’d love to have an experimental week of playing around with UE4’s cutscene creations. 
• Game Modes: I’m keen on an Ironman Mode (1 life or 1 play through) with live leaderboards (external website?) and perhaps a save/load story mode. Major discussion, major decisions. 

These lists have been added to the trello to plan, schedule and maintain updates. The future devlogs will be more research and analysis based- with a few hype posts pre-beta and occasionally to tie everything together. The trello can be found here: https://trello.com/b/DpVax9Nm/tzakouza-ii

I just want to end this devlog by saying thank you to everyone who played, downloaded or took part in the user study. I’m still new(ish) and getting used to all this, but it’s honestly such a blessing. 

See you soon.