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The Home Stretch

Tonight was another highly productive playtest, this time with none other than Greg Kasavin of Supergiant Games.  After finishing Bastion, I have a new level of respect for Greg’s design and storytelling savvy, so I was really excited and anxious to hear what he would say about Escape Goat.

Overall he enjoyed playing it through, with just a few levels serving up more frustration than he would normally endure.  The difficulty tuning is the main thing I am focusing on at this point, so it was great to know which levels were the real sticking points.  He had great advice for extra aesthetics and details, like idle animations for the creatures and some more deliberate feedback for completing levels and unlocking new levels.

At this stage, the playtests still result in the usualy 3 pages of notes, but the related tasks are way less scary.  It’s all about tuning, decorations, and minor glitches to fix.  It’s coming along nicely and I can’t wait to present it to the XNA Creator’s Club soon.

Playtest Party Aftermath

This evening was a small scale playtest party with Randy  O’Connor (who had played Escape Goat) and two of his friends (who had not).  Huge props to them for sticking through and playing the WHOLE game start to finish, trading off levels among the three of them.  Things got started around 8 and ended around midnight, with some breaks in there, so we’re still at about 3 hours of gameplay give or take.

I’ve got tons of notes, so it’s a matter of determining what’s possible to do for this game while still keeping control of scope.

I can also proudly say that for the first time, there’s no placeholder music in the build anymore.  Not all songs are complete, so a couple levels shared the same background music, but it was all mine.  I’m digging the sound so far and I hope you will too.

Preparing For Tomorrow’s Playtest

This morning was lost to computer issues, but I recovered and came back strong.  Inspired by the awesome Bastion soundtrack, I got pumped up to make some Escape Goat music.  As of this evening, I’ve got drafts and sketches for 14 songs, and only need about 9 final pieces to complete the soundtrack.

Tomorrow night is a playtest with an all new crew, and this should be the first time it’s got all the placeholder music stripped out.  Exciting!  It’s coming together.