Things are moving along more well than I anticipated. I am currently 31 hours into the game. If you check out the screenshot above, I am almost half way into year 3. I don’t want to give the impression I’m trying to move through this game at 1 year per week, I would like to move much, much, faster. But this is just the pace it ended up being. I actually expect things to slow down as I get to the later years.

With that said, I really am surprised at how things are going as far as testing is concern. Throughout the second year, I made so many glaring mistakes I had to stop the game 5-10 times each map. For the third year, I hardly ran into any game stopping bugs. Just a few easily fixable mistakes. I hope this is a sign the rest of the years will go just as smooth.

I’ve been recording all of the game testing I’ve done for documentation purposes. Here is some footage of the last map I’ve just completed. In this map, you fight the 3rd boss of the game.

I’ve been concerned about the difficulty of this game. At times, things felt too easy or not challenging enough. After fighting the 3rd boss, a few things became clear to me. One, this boss was hard to beat. Even though I used the same trick from the previous boss, I still struggled to win. This is good! I really enjoyed that battle.

Two, I still don’t think it’s enough as far as the rest of the game. I’m seriously considering adding an easy mode (for story enjoyers and game testers) and hard mode. (for min/maxer and crazy people)

Since I’m only 3 years into the game and I know the battles will ramp up big time in the later half of the game. I’m going to continue to wait and see how things play out. I might only need to adjust some values in the first two years of the game.

Speaking of adjusting, I’ve been constantly trying to forge a balance with spending money and managing the daughter’s Mood and Condition. I’ve already implemented a few systems to balance the player’s decisions, but I didn’t believe it was enough.

There was a interaction I’d been brain storming since the beginning of the game’s development where the daughter simply ask the player for things. If the player gets it, she is happy, if not, she gets upset.

I finally decided to implement a version of this into the game. The purpose of this mechanic is to keep the player engaged with the variety of shopping options. It doesn’t reward you since it should be a fairly easy objective to fulfill, but if you don’t fulfill the request or if you choose to ignore the request too often, the daughter’s Mood and Condition will be seriously impacted.

Another change I’ve recently made is for the exploration. When you attempt to take items after running out of vitality, you will be hit with Vitality Poison. This effect stays on you until you leave the map. This was fine with me but it also isn’t that big of a threat in the long run. But then a mechanic I forgot I even implemented hit me. (literally) I was struck by a random status effect outside of battle.

That’s it!!

Not only will you get Vitality Poison for exploring without vitality, but you will eventually get hit with nasty status effects as well. And these bad boys don’t go away outside of exploration so they will follow you until you use them up in battle. (or cure them with an item)

I hope these changes will make the game more fun and full of surprises to keep the player engaged.

Lastly, I’ve been looking into methods for speeding up the loading. At the moment, it’s pretty long. I know there will be people wondering why a 2d game takes any time to load at all, but this is just something I didn’t consider when I was making decisions at the beginning of the development.

I’ve managed to get the time down a bit, but I’m afraid there won’t be much else I can do at the moment unless I make some drastic structural changes to the core project. Something like that is going to have to wait until after release.

Ah well, these are just things I’ve been thinking about. It’s time to get back to the game testing. Onward!