AbsurDock playtest progress 5
Returning late with news is becoming a tradition at this point, but the playtest is releasing this weekend. Balancing and pacing work has worn me down, and my enthusiasm wears a little thinner with every deadline i miss. So here it is: the playtest goes public on Saturday or Sunday, the 10th or 11th of October.
What the multiplayer test caught
Some 1-on-1 sessions and a “mass multiplayer” round of four people turned up too many problems to count off the top of my head, and it wasn’t pretty. Had i released the playtest last Sunday, multiplayer would quite possibly have been unplayable. With no meaningful network recovery in place, a single desync could corrupt a player’s entire session and completely break things like respawn and fishing.
Detected exceptions are fixed now, and hard desyncs get resynced mid-game. That only covers the problems i know about, though, and there are very likely more waiting for the public playtest. So even if you just got bored and left, a feedback report saying so is the most useful thing you can send.
What new players showed me in 40 minutes
Besides the technical side, the sessions exposed a lot of design and onboarding problems, not all of them fixed yet. Here are some:
- Nobody could tell what the point was. This is 95% a concept issue and 5% tutorial pacing (which got completely redone). After failing, players usually did the exact same thing again, failed again, and after a couple of rounds got tired and left. When i designed the reworked minigame, i assumed punishing failures would just push players toward different approaches. It didn’t.Slashing failure chances in half and adding a goal card (more in points 2 and 4) are my partial answer; the rest is what the playtest is for.
- Fixing the game for casuals breaks it for min-maxers. The moment the math works for casuals, it falls apart on the first functional 5-bait combo. That’s a concept problem too. “Trickle-down” balancing, tuning for experienced players and hoping it works for everyone, doesn’t work here: the second the game is even mildly challenging for experienced players, it becomes an onboarding nightmare for new ones. So the playtest will be significantly more casual than i wanted, for better or worse.
- The “nice-to-have” QoL turned out to be mandatory. Vending machine codes now save automatically to a code cheat sheet on entry, unnecessary AFK timers are gone, and in-depth, real-time hints reflect the current state of gameplay. I figured all of that could wait for the demo or the full game. It turned out to be a prerequisite for the game sustaining a session: players didn’t keep records of the codes they found, and nobody sat AFK long enough to justify the timers.
- The 17-step tutorial didn’t work, especially for groups. It was full of detail for an attentive reader, which is exactly what a friend group isn’t, and everybody collectively ignored the tutorial panel in the top right corner and got lost at step 8. It’s now a 10-step guided fishing spine with 16 context-triggered tips and a final altar goal card, so hopefully nobody will have to ask what the goal is or what to do next.
I was completely blind to all of this until i watched a brand-new player and a group play for the first time. Nearly every issue above surfaced in under 40 minutes.
Escaping the rework loop (probably)
If you’ve read the previous posts, you know the last two weeks went to redesigning systems that already existed. Part of that is my planning, but part of it is sample size. Small sessions are great at catching hard breakage, like corrupted game state or progression you can’t get past. They’re bad at telling me why someone loses interest, and that’s exactly what the tutorial and fishing changes keep circling around.
The constant flow of new requirements is pretty much a symptom of not having enough player data. Every fix this week came from guessing at one or two testers’ behavior, and each guess turned up the next problem. As it turns out, one bored playtester is a great alarm and a terrible compass. A public playtest ends that loop. Local telemetry archives sent only with manually filed feedback reports will show where people quit, which mechanics they never touch, and whether they reach the next step on the progression ladder. Then i get to fix the two or three things that actually matter instead of ten that might.
The plan: ship it and pray
Right now i’m polishing the last rough corners and the known egregious lag spikes. The build is technically publish-ready, but i’d rather spend the two remaining days testing every edge case myself before it hits the internet.
As for the release itself, i’ll probably shadow drop it onto Steam, write a sad little sob-post on r/playmygame, and pray for the best. Getting at least 10 bug reports would already be worth a lot.
This is probably my last blog post before the playtest is out. The next one will likely be a subjective report of how it went.
Until that happens, be sure to wishlist AbsurDock on Steam, and be the first one to check it out once it becomes playable as an Open Access Steam playtest.