Update Incoming

Hey folks,

I hope that the past couple weeks have been treating you well. We here have been taking the time to enjoy our brief Thanksgiving break before returning back to work on this project. With us spending the time instead gathering what feedback that we can about how our game plays in it's current stage. While we won't be able to improve all the aspects of the game, we are choosing to focus on the most important pieces of feedback that we got so that we can improve the demo one step at a time. Among these problems are a number of game breaking glitches and bugs that weren't noticed before the demos release, along with other oddities that playtesters have told us about. All of these we wish to address soon, but for now the important aspects are as follows. 

• Thieves are not leaving the game level properly.

This is an issue that seems to be doing with how the thieves are managed by the game. After some tinkering, I believe this is fixed on my end, but this may require more playtesting for me to be sure. 

• The UI doesn't scale well with a number of different monitors, causing it to be buggy. 

The UI we went with for this game is meant to harken back to older games and meant to give the player all the things they need without interfering with the game itself. The problem, however, is that based on how we did it, the UI doesn't mask the whole screen, leaving some clear holes that tend to peak through on different resolutions. This problem has been rectify for our next build. Though this is a temporary fix for the time being.

• The UI is difficult to use when it comes to controlling the character. 

This is definitely something that we are taking into mind as we progress on making the game. At this time, there are plans to do a complete UI overhaul as our current UI is way to clunky and doesn't quite work as we would like, however I do not believe we'll have a new UI ready by the release of our next Demo. We also are hoping that in the upcoming patches and updates, we'll have clearer instructions on how to play the game, including a brief tutorial. Though there is a lot left to discuss about this sort of thing. 

• Capture Radius wasn't really all that clear.

This was a problem I knew would need a fix soon. I just didn't have the time to implement a proper fix before we had to go live. It's not a perfect fix, but should help deal with some of the problems people have been having in this regard.

With all that said, there are all sorts of other issues we have taken note, and I admittedly can't offer notes on the progress of these points as they are being worked on by other team members. An important one being that the controls for the game is pretty unclear, which makes sense given that we only really give any instructions on the Itch.io page itself. I do apologize for this. The final product would likely have a tutorial to make navigating the game easier, but I am hopeful that we can get at least some instructions up for the game before the next update. Most of us wish to stick with the drawing mechanic as we believe it adds more to our game then it subtracts, and are instead working on making the drawing controls easier and more intuitive to do. That is going to be a major part of the future UI design. Though any feedback on that part of our design is of course always appreciated. 

With that said, expect another update sometime on 11/28/2023, which is now today. Our team is still hard at work on this project, and we wish for nothing, but to make it enjoyable to play.  So thank you for your time, and see you real soon.