Issue #6 - Incorporating Feedback

So if you are new or just hearing of Barty's Adventure, first of all welcome! I just released version 0.2 two weeks back, and I have been getting a flood of feedback and ideas from the community. I can't say thanks enough to those who jumped into the early build and explored The House. I want to make this game as fun and interesting as possible, and that won't happen without honest feedback early in the development process. If you want to take part in giving feedback, you can find the v0.2 build here and provide feedback in the Discord.

Where is Everybody??

So I received two major comments that seemed to be consistent among all testers. The first is that the world actually seemed pretty empty. When exploring the first two areas (Princess Dolly's Castle and Stuffies Town), people noticed that there just wasn't much there:

• There were only a few NPCs, and you can't interact with them,
• The background art was pretty sparse and empty,
• There was no direction on where to go and what to do.

All of these are completely fair and true!

What I came to realize over the past two weeks is that this opening area is SUPER important, even for early builds. I can make the second coming of Undertale in later biomes, but if people get so bored with the opening area they never see it, what's the point? I need to get moving on adding the content to Dolly's Castle and Stuffies Town now if I'm ever going to get people to spend more than ten minutes in a build.

Luckily all of the content for this area has been planned. Full dialogue for the NPCs (and more of them!) are all planned and mapped out, a tutorial and onboarding section has been storyboarded and designed but not implemented, and I already have ideas for the next couple of world art passes.

Overall, this repeated comment hammers home that my planned "sprints" may not have been planned out in the most logical manner. If you remember from a couple of issues back, I have divided the remaining work on the game into Sprints:

1 - NPC Schedules and Movement (due Sept. 3, 2023)
2 - Enemy Logic and Combat (Dec. 3, 2023)
3 - Collectables and Powerups (Mar. 10, 2024)
4 - Unique Area Features (July 28, 2024)
5 - Old Toy Bin Customization (Sept. 1, 2024)
6 - Dialogues and Cutscenes (Jan. 19, 2025)
7 - UI, Accessibility, Menus (Mar. 16, 2025)
8 - Music and Sounds (Sept. 7, 2025)

When taken in context with the feedback above, you can see the issue. My sprints are task or discipline focused. This will result in the game missing significant aspects (music, dialogue, etc.) until much later in production. The feedback is demanding a more vertical focus: take the first area and create the vertical slice where all art, systems, music, and content are present. Then move to the next area and do the same. This will shake up my schedule, but I think it's what's needed to genuinely build up interest as the release gets closer.

Creepy, Crawly Bugs

The second major comment I received from testers is more of a category with the same theme: there are too many bugs in the game. I thought that this would be understood, since this is a super early build. I even put a disclaimer on the itch page that you should expect bugs! But what I've found is that even testers expect a certain amount of polish and some Quality of Life (QoL) features are non-negotiable.

Taking a look at my sprint schedule above, QoL is way down in Sprint 7. But without properly functioning menus, a save system, or reasonable UI, people won't test my game for more than a few minutes. So all of those technical parts of the game that aren't super fun to make now get bumped up on the priority list. And I also need to start whittling down the huge bug list I have running, or else I'll simply be repeatedly feeding my testers bad with any good. It's the game developer's version of eating my vegetables, even if there's a plate of cookies waiting to be devoured too.

Refocus and Next Steps

So what does this mean for my precious sprint schedule? I think it means that I need to take a hard look at what's a priority for v0.3 (releasing July 1st!). I made a running list of technical aspects that should be a priority, such as save states, menus, resolutions, and HUD to focus on in the next couple of months. After that, it'll be time for a glow-up for Stuffies Town, as I know I need to address this feedback. And if all of that works out, I may be switching the sprint schedule altogether to shift to a more vertical slice-focused schedule. I really enjoyed going fat and wide to start the process and it helped me understand the scope and design of the game as a whole. But now I think I need to make a change to skinny and narrow in order to get better engagement with my builds and prepare the framework for a demo.

Talk to you soon! 😄

This newsletter is an update series for the development of the game Barty's Adventure. If you are interested in continuing the conversation, please join the community Discord server: https://discord.gg/M7p2Mtgkyx. Your input in these early stages of the game are invaluable and much appreciated. Thanks!