Last weeks devlog was delayed because of my personal schedule, but we're still here!

We showcased our first playable last week. At least 12 people played our game and provided feedback. We saw some really encouraging things, and some very instructional moments.

The top 3 positive things from our playtest:

• People loved the movement: Most players had a good time jumping around the level, vaulting over obstacles, and just going really fast. We got the most compliments on this element, which is good considering we spent the most time on it!
• Our onboarding was pretty solid: While some players struggled through our tutorial, we got a lot of compliments for how we taught the player the various movement mechanics in a proactive way without too much handholding
• People had fun!

The top 3 teachable moments from our playtest:

• We need to give our stealth mechanics some TLC: We've focused so much on movement these past few weeks that our stealth has languished in the backlog. Certain mechanics don't provide the functionality we want, such as enemies being too easily alerted by sound and stealthy movement being too slow compared to normal movement. We need to bring these features more into harmony with the rest of what we're building in order to have a good stealth/platformer hybrid
• Our level architecture/backgrounds need to be more clear: We didn't plan our environment art and our level design practices as well as we should have, which led to certain tiles being used in confusing ways that left players unsure where they could go and what pathways were blocked
• Our UI needs a lot of work: We had a really fun idea of putting tutorial videos on billboards in the background, but we made them too small and too dark, and just generally inaccessible to players. The button prompts we provided for the mechanics are also far too small to be useful

Moving forward with this feedback in mind, we worked this week to adjust our UI, as well as to establish level design practices to avoid confusing architecture. We've also made progress in our stealth mechanics, and will continue to work on it moving into the next sprint.

Next week is the deadline for our pre-alpha build! We have a lot to do, and it's only going to get more busy from here.