BANE WITH WITCHFIRE MOVIE
BANE WITH WITCHFIRE FULL

Some people spend 20+ hours on the first boss. It’s something you know exists, right? Take Returnal, for example, that PS5 exclusive. Three, what don’t you know that you don’t know? It doesn’t always happen, but sometimes the playtest will reveal an issue you had no idea existed, or will give you a fresh new perspective on the game.ĭid anything like this happen with our first Witchfire playtest? Not quite but I was surprised by the skill gap among the players. So, early playtests make you realize what you forgot to prioritize, and how much you’re used to things that are obvious only to you. It’s just that we either forgot about it, or put it inside the “will deal with it later” drawer – and we all know what happens next… We knew that we needed to visually separate attacks and defenses, and we knew we needed to make the protective spell easier to understand. One time the aura is a shield, another it’s an attack warning. But …isn’t that just another aura, another “circle around the enemy”? Of course it is, and it adds to the confusion. You can see that on the right side of the screen: the sword-wielding enemy is about to jump-dash to the player, so a fiery magical aura flashes around him. Some of the more powerful enemy attacks are telegraphed with a special visual effect. Well, this dude has some sort of an aura? But what is it? Doesn’t matter, kill it with fire!īut wait, there’s more. This allows for some interesting gameplay scenarios, where for example units with low HP but strong attacks suddenly, thanks to the witch’s protection, become much more of a threat.Īnd all that is nice and dandy except …almost no one got it in the playtest. this enemy but without the aura), and – rarely, but still – the shielded one (e.g. Almost any enemy in the game can exists in two versions: the regular one (e.g. It’s the enemy’s magical shield, a spell cast by the witch, effectively increasing their HP. There is a red aura with a smoky dark shadow around the enemy. Let me give you an example straight from our playtest:

BANE WITH WITCHFIRE FULL

So, you have a game full of things that are important …but they don’t work, because no one gets them.īasically, playtests expose all the placeholders, shortcuts and temporary solutions you forgot about. Two, what is it that you no longer see? Game developers often add half-baked features forgetting that what is clear to them is not necessarily clear to the players.

BANE WITH WITCHFIRE MOVIE

If these things are at placeholder quality, it’s like watching a Marvel movie cut without any special effects and a green screen in every scene. It doesn’t work, say, for walking sims or some adventure games in which the atmosphere is such a key factor that the playtest only makes sense with proper, almost final quality visuals and sounds. Note that this works only for mechanics-heavy games. But your core gameplay loop should be done by now, and you should see the players engaging with it and enjoying it. One, are the players having fun? Sure, at this point of the development your game is probably quite buggy, doesn’t look the way you imagine it to look, and is generally rough around the edges. There are three important questions that early playtests answer. We wanted to be 100% sure that what we consider hard is truly hard …or see people effortlessly beat the playtest build, revealing we suck at video games.īefore we get to the actual story, a short explanation of what I mean by “you should playtest your game as early as it makes sense”. at a level we had trouble beating ourselves.

We knew that but we still kept the test build’s difficulty high, i.e. So, if a game is hard for the creator, it’s usually twice as hard for the players …until the playtests show this and everything is properly re-balanced for the final release. Game developers have this natural tendency to make their game on the hard side, because they know all of its systems inside out, and play it daily. Witchfire is supposed to be a challenging game but we’re making it for so long now that we cannot be objective about its difficulty. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but for now we wanted the answer to one important question: is the difficulty right? We simply believe you should playtest your game as early as it makes sense. We invited a couple of industry friends – easier this way, they know what a work-in-progress build is and won’t be distracted by missing textures or placeholders sounds – to our studio to play the game for an hour or two.ĭoes this mean we’re nearing the end of the development? No. A few days ago, we held the very first playtest of Witchfire.

Bane with witchfire