Hey guys,
So things are looking excellent for getting the "redshirt" beta testers in on Monday. A few general notes:
1. I've been focused on the early parts of the game, and have only unit tested the middle and late game. The start of the game is feeling super solid to me, but frankly the late game just has not had enough testing yet. That's just how it's going to be, I think. The main criteria for me is that the game is fun, and in my opinion it is.
It's possible that it STOPS being fun after a certain point into the game at the moment, but if that's the case then that's a matter of balance and other refinement, not a ground-up change to anything core. Getting past that point where I know it's fun and that nothing gravitationally-moon-sized needs to change has been my big focus of things to happen prior to beta. We're there already, frankly.
2. The last few days have seen me working on mostly stuff that is aimed at making the play experience more fluid in general. The balance of the early game I got pretty much where I want it (for now) last week, and the last days have seen me pecking away at all the little nits that keep bothering me. Oh, and stuff where I literally could not make a good decision because the information was not exposed to me. I'm sure I missed some stuff of that sort, but all of the early blatant stuff I think I've gotten now.
3. The overall HUD for the game is something Blue and I have been working on for the last few days as well. Just in writing (on my part) and photoshop (on her part) so far. We first got things to where they were arranged the way that we want now that we know all the stuff that will be on the screen. It's VERY different from how the gui currently is in the game. Things on the left have moved to the top, things on the bottom moved to the left, some of the stuff on the left moved to the bottom, etc. The reasoning for that is based on my playtesting and my frustrations with things like screen space being too obscured at times by tooltips or whatnot, and also by how hard or how easy it is to get to certain functions.
So the bottom line is that the new HUD is far superior, but it's also going to take some adjustment to just because things are all moving around. I'm in the boat of having to re-learn muscle memory for those things when they get in place. I have like 40 hours of playtime in the game, so it's going to be an adjustment. The question is: do you want to have your first experience be learning the already-old HUD and then immediately having to relearn the new one? Or would you rather wait for the new GUI?
I don't have a solid ETA on the new GUI, but I'd be surprised if we can't get that done by sometime Tuesday. So it would delay redshirt entry by a day or so, let's say.
Opinions?
