Hello everyone, and welcome to the second edition of Knight George's monthly(-ish?) devlogs!

As you might know, the first public demo of the game arrived almost two months ago, and it did gather some valuable feedbacks from players. I wanted to take a little bit of time to go over some and how much helpful these are for any gamedev! But let's start with the obvious question:

Why is player feedback so important?

It seems like one of these questions which answer is obvious, but I cannot stress enough how essential getting feedbacks from players is for game development. When you are making a game, you tend to have an unconscious bias: you know where and when to go, how things work AND how to make them work. And you then naturally believe it will be clear and easy for everyone!

Let me give you an example from Knight George's demo. A miniboss fight is triggered upon reaching a certain room, with a fan pushing the player into the arena on the left-hand side of the screen.

Once the fight is over, a teleporting portal appears inside the arena, prompting many players to use it immediately to return to the Temple's entrance... missing a crucial chest with this dungeon's item in the southern part of the room! This would make them lose quite some time trying to explore new places they just could not reach without the item, thus making them frustrated.

This is the kind of thing that can even slip through playtests, especially for small indies who can't afford to have a huge number of professional testers going multiple time through every portion of the game. I could go on about how other people feedback can drastically improve a game for much longer (I have many examples of this for HooperVania, my previous big project), but let's focus on Knight George:

What changes are planned for Knight George?

Many small things are coming into Knight George, as some of you might have already spotted on the screenshot above. The HUD has been reworked, most notably to display which items are currently equiped: the old version took too much place and people sometimes mistook the HUD with an opening in walls.

The "C Button", that was used to perform actions such as talking to NPCs or picking up things, will also be dropped. It was an optional button that could be deactivated, but I had enough players saying it was more confusing that anything, so off it goes!

Small changes are also done in the Ma'tava Temple to make it easier to navigate, such as moving the portal mentioned above to encourage players to keep on exploring the room, or showing a locked door with a short camera translation to make sure players saw it. A few glitches also got fixed along the way!

One of the biggest takeaways is also the writing of the game that can be overly talkative or a bit devoid of emotion here and there. Definitely something we will work on as the development continues!

Overall, players had a great time on the demo and I am truly happy with that! If you haven't played or reacted to the demo yet, please leave a little feedback indicating what's good and what's to improve!

What's next?

An improved demo version will come out in the next two weeks, featuring most of the changes described above, as the game will be featured in the ARC'INDIE virtual exposition!

Regular development will then resume, and I'll see you guys at the end of November! Take care!