Based on feedback from playtesters for Fool’s Treasure, we have revised some aspects our game to improve the player experience, with the main focus being on pacing. In order to test these changes, we ran a few more playtests and began creating our alpha build inside the Twine engine.
The team working on the story.
Alpha Design Changes
To solve some problems our initial paper-playtesters had, we decided to drop the idea of random islands in the archipelago, as we found that players felt like they had no choice what they were doing. Additionally, we decided to switch from the goal being to collect as much treasure as possible, to a more story-driven goal where you collect useful items and tools. Making the game more story-based allows us to further develop the characters and settings, and adding more useful items gives us room to add more puzzle-like elements into the game. We believe these changes will result in a more entertaining experience.
About the Alpha
The alpha build for our first phase of alpha testing is meant to get more in-depth feedback about the design/structural changes we have made, and to see if the parts of the story that have been developed more are any good. As such, this version of the alpha contains almost only what is needed to serve this purpose, and contains no major art or sounds (those will come later). This version of the alpha primarily focuses on the introduction and the archipelago, especially the structure and interactions between the islands in the archipelago. It also contains our rough draft of the rest of the story, so we can get more feedback about what works well and what doesn’t.
The title screen for the alpha.
Results so far
Over the past few days, we have had a few people alpha test for us. So far, players have seemed to like the new structure of the archipelago, and how the different items interact with the world. A number of testers also suggested additional (albeit smaller) changes to the islands that could make this part of the game even more fun. As for the story, different testers liked certain parts more than others. Out of the part of the story that was more developed, there are a few places that need some rewriting and a few more that need some rewording, but players seemed fine with the general structure.