Early playtesting

I recently  finished implementing the first real dungeon (following the tutorial zone), and I spent a few days playtesting it. I don't want to put too fine a point on playtesting at this stage, but I also wanted to make sure that my general approach was on track before I continued making content.  Basically, I wasn't just testing combat balance, but skill configuration, dungeon design, game flow, stat formulas, and so on. I played through the first dungeon (three floors) twice - once with the current default party, and once with a party of the other five aspects (classes).

This ended up being really valuable. I made a ton of adjustments based on these sessions, but there were a few main takeaways:

• I had a lot of fun playing the core gameplay loop – clearing as much of the dungeon as I could before retreating to spend my Remnants (cash) on healing and maybe a new piece of equipment. There's plenty of polish left to add, but I'm pretty happy with how the game feels to play right now. This was actually a pleasant surprise and a relief. Combat alone took a lot of iteration and tuning, and I really wasn't sure how the rest of the game was shaping up.
• The difficulty was overall too low. Monsters were often too weak or too few in number, leveling was too fast, and equipment was too cheap. There were also a few bare spots where it felt like there should have been monsters or treasure. I touched up the layout a bit and bumped up the difficulty, particularly on the end boss.
• My second party ended up being noticeably easier than the first due to buff and debuff assignment being a bit more lopsided than I intended. I also found that some aspects blurred together too much and didn't feel distinct. I revised some of the skill assignments and altered some skills to hopefully make each aspect more interesting and defined, but this will be an ongoing focal point.

Besides that, I have mostly been checking off lots of smaller features and quality of life improvements – things I haven't gotten around to until now. One thing in particular that I have been consistently dissatisfied with was the environment visuals – the textures, the colors, and the dithered “torchlight” sight radius. I finally managed to tweak these things to where I'm reasonably happy with them, at least for this dungeon. Here's the entrance to the first labyrinth, the hospital:

I've never written pre-release dev logs before, so if you're interested in this project, let me know what you'd like to hear about.