My RPG Maker Game Jam project, #No_Hacks, is officially complete! I'll probably have 1 more post about this game to showcase the final game with screenshots and post-mortems, but in this post, I'll cover the final playtesting and last updates I made before submitting it.
To start, I finished playtesting all the way through and adding a few minor things along the way while bug testing and polishing. I created a view for my Notion Database that shows the bugs only (or any updates I noticed during playtesting). I also added a few more sorts to help me keep track of which ones I want to work on next and which ones I finished and am just waiting on testing. I also made a category for all of the FINAL updates/ to make/reminders for when the game's done. This really helped me stay organized through all of this.
Then I exported all of the hint image files since the maps are complete.
From there, I did some minor tweaks like updating the camera puzzle so it's more limited to which directions cameras can rotate in, and I added extra dialogue to serve as hints, depending on what they typed in the console, if it's an invalid movement.
Then I added additional tutorial elements to the beginning portion of the game. This included adding dialogue choice options in Inky and then designing what the show choices visual would look like.
I also created an FAQ document that opens if you prompt to view the extra tutorial and need extra help. I also made some back-up measures if things are blocked to ensure the player knows how to progress.
While playtesting, I added more keyboard functionality so you can access all of the menu controls with the keyboard. This way, the game is fully playable without a mouse. I added them to the visuals of the UI as well.
Then I added further instructions for the console to help the player remember what they found in the external files.
And then I added a few extra expressions to make the dialogue feel more involved. It was mostly to Murou, but I did add an extra one to Zandra as well.
So I did a lot of playtesting. Fixing minor bugs and adding quality of life settings. Just overall a lot of polish to get this game out the door. I had a moment where the #Services puzzle just stopped working... and it turns out I accidentally overwrote one of the event pages when I was copying them over. So I went into my GitHub and found the backup before this happened. I didn't want to have to deal with downloading the whole project and making a copy of it, so I found the specific map.json file and then searched for the specific event ID I was missing and was able to copy that line of code from the previous version into my current version. And it fixed it! I'm so glad I've been keeping these GitHub backups or that would've been a lot of work to have to redo that whole puzzle in the last week.
Similar to my last RPG Maker Game Jam project, I wanted to add a note about autosaves and controls upfront, so I added a couple of screens at the start as well.
And then I also made a splash screen for myself!
Once it was all in a good enough spot, I asked my friend Jinny to test my game on Tuesday. She was able to get through the game without any game-breaking bugs! Then she helped me a lot to continue to test and try her hardest to break the game. Only one of them truly crashed the game (and that was only after she deliberately went into the game files to rename a folder, which is unlikely to happen!). So I was happy to have thoroughly tested this beforehand so it was fairly hard to completely break. She found a few areas that could make things skipped or slightly confusing though, so I was able to take a lot of notes while she played and come up with solutions. I even added some fail-safe areas to prevent the player from completely breaking their game if they delete files and made the FAQs a bit more prominent in menus and folders.
The biggest area of feedback that was difficult for me to test but was really great to hear from her perspective was a few areas of the game that be clarified a bit more. I was so used to knowing where to go that there was a point that was a bit confusing and I had less hand-holding, so I could help the player with a few more hints there. She was still able to figure it out eventually without my help, but it was a bit difficult. She also let me know which puzzles were too easy or too hard, so I'm planning to look into adjusting the difficulty on those as well.
I ended up deciding to add a few Easter Eggs for some characters from The Nays. I'm not sure if anyone will ever find these, but it was a fun little writing break while deep in debugging and playtesting.
And then I continued to playtest and debug. I ran into a bug where my camera lights would rotate in weird ways and not follow the camera when you reloaded the map. I was trying everything and it seemed random. Finally, I realized their position was changing but not their direction, and the camera's direction was resetting. So I created an event that sets their default positions and basically regenerates the lights to rotate in the direction that the camera is rotated to fix this.
And from there, I did some final playtests and finished the game! The final updates I made were fixing up the keyboard controls. I found out if you spammed the C or V buttons, it would then spam open the menus repeatedly. So I ended up making a second Common Event specifically for the keyboard press version that calls the clicked event, and sets its status to false so you can't repeatedly open them. It seems to work, so this will likely be how I'll be programming my menus going forward!
After submitting the game online, I got feedback about the kick mechanic being the least favorite part of the game. This was also during the beta test, so I decided to do something about that the day before it was due. I created a new Kick button that appears that you can use (in addition to a key bind) to make that easier.
The most challenging part of this was actually coding it to be an option in the Options menu that the player could turn on or off. This meant figuring out how to control switches properly in the VisuStellaMZ Options plugin, which never worked quite how I wanted it to previously. I eventually got it working.
This did mean that I had to run a parallel event on this map that calls a common event immediately upon closing the menu though.
I also updated the plugin to add the switch.
And then sometimes had to manually change the config options to match if I ever changed the switch manually. It took me a few hours to figure out, but I learned a lot from this that I'll be able to use in the future for creating custom options.
I also had to add more dialogue to the Dark_Wolf hint at this time to allow the player to turn it on or off when it first appears and also having her tell you that you can change it in the Options menu at any time. I'm hoping this will make that puzzle more enjoyable!
I finished and uploaded about 2 days early, so it feels good to be done. I did a lot of playtesting and didn't run into anything game-breaking, so I'm hoping it's good to go!
No comments:
Post a Comment