Studio Ganzheit

The voice recording is moving along quickly. It’s my first time using voices.com and it’s been great. One of the actors already sent in their recording and I’ve got it in the build. It’s a completely different world from how this used to work. Apart from the final detailed editing — tightening the gaps between lines, that sort of thing — I handled everything through scripts, so it went fast. Compared to the old recording process, the change is enormous. I’m looking forward to the version with all the voices replaced.

(And right after saying that, I found a missing line and had to pay extra for an additional recording. These mistakes… sigh.)

Getting gameplay video is difficult, and it’s a hassle for the players who record it too, especially the uploading. So I set it up to save player coordinates every 10 seconds and send them to Discord via webhook every 10 minutes. Then I pulled that data back and plotted it in the engine, and it was a shock. (The coordinates are anonymous, and this is disclosed at the start of every build.)

I’d heard complaints before about not being able to find the way early on, and I never quite understood it. The first 30 minutes might look complicated, but the progression is purely linear. Now that abilities come a bit earlier there’s more area to move around in, but the logical structure of the first 30 minutes is still a straight line, however winding it looks. So “I can’t find the way” made no sense to me — until today.

The game opens with you breaking through a glass wall. I assumed that established, obviously, that glass walls can be broken. Then there’s a long corridor, and since just running down it seemed dull, I put a breakable glass wall in it. But the paths turned back at that point. From there they showed players searching all over other areas. Maybe they were just looking around, but it means that without that glass wall they could have kept going straight through. It never occurred to me that the glass wall would act as a barrier.

This is how I’ve been fixing the early game, one piece at a time. Some of the important skills that used to sit at the 15, 30, and 45-minute marks were moved to the start, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes, so players can range more widely from the beginning — I thought that would make it more fun, but there’s no feedback on the revised version yet so I don’t really know. That’s why I’ve been handing out alpha keys as much as I can.

Still, finding something I never would have imagined and fixing it feels genuinely rewarding. (No idea if it’s the right direction.) Rewarding and hard at the same time.