Devlog December 2023

This December was rich with events for our small team. We implemented a new playtest system, and after that, our testers sent us tons of feedback. When we finished analyzing it, we decided to make some changes to our new battle UI and the previolsy made tutorial. Oh, and our Steam page is finally online!

Steam and marketing

Our small dream has finally been fulfilled: Dead Weight is finally on Steam, surrounded by our beloved games. The game release might still be far, but this thought alone warms our gaming-loving hearts... You can warm them too by adding Dead Weight to your wishlist!

Wanna get some inside marketing info? Of course you do! In 6 days we got more than 600 wishlists. UTM links only tracked 1/3 of them.

Most of our wishlists came from Russia, thanks to our social media pages. The US got second place mainly because our first Reddit post ever got a lot of attention.

Live playtests and feedback

During our previous playtests, we learned that most of the players found our game too complicated. To solve this issue, we decided to change our battle UI and create a complete tutorial section. After it was all done we needed someone to test it.

Dead Weight game designer watching the livetesting.

That's why we decided to try live testing for the first time. A few people who were willing to participate and had never played Dead Weight before were selected. Later, we called them on Discord and asked them to play the new tutorial section on stream.

Every player had the exact same set of tasks, but they all found different ways to solve them. Some of them were unquestioningly following all the tips from the mysterious voice inside their heads. Others decided to go their own way.

We noticed four different types of players:

1. The player reads and follows all the tips we left them. For this type of player, completing the tutorial sections was pretty easy.

2. The player still reads the tips but misses a lot of important information. It leads to misunderstanding of some core game mechanincs. For this type of player, completing the tutorial section was difficult, but still doable.

3. The player decides not to read the tips and hopes to use their gaming experience to solve the tasks. Because of that, they struggle with completing the tasks and get negative experience with the game.

4. The player reads the tips but does not want to follow them. Instead, they want to stress-test the game. They do all they can to find bugs and exploits. Such a playthrough takes a lot of time, but it's so interesting to watch.

500 fuel units? Something isn't right here.

After the first couple of tests, we made some adjustments based on the testers' feedback. We made the tips shorter and highlighted key words to make them easier to understand, added some restrictions to traveling to stop players from getting lost, fixed a few bugs, and created save points.

The voice in your head can be pretty useful.

At first, we hoped that the players would finish the tutorial in 30-40 minutes. In reality, they only managed to complete roughly 40% of it in that time. That's why we decided to force an ending at 40% of the tutorial. Although there is still a way to bypass the ending and see the remaining 60%. Maybe someone will find a way to do it...

UI

We wrote a lot about UI changes in our previous devlogs, but, sadly, they aren't (yet?) translated. The moment we received some feedback regarding these changes, we decided to make some changes to it.

During live tests, it became obvious how hard it was for the player to notice that the enemy was preparing an attack. To fix it, we replaced the old attack indicator with a new one. Some of you will definetly find it familiar...

Moments before disaster.

This is still a temporary solution. We are thinking about whether we should add a special attack preparation animation or not.

RIP

In December we:

• made 172 build updates

• got 666 wishlists

• got 2 followers who wanted to make a donation

• got 19 000 impressions on Reddit

• planned 1 demo release on Q1 2024

• got 2 sick team members

• ate 78 tangerines

• spent 10+ hours on live testing

• drank 722 cups of tea

• organized 1 party

• got 21 700 impressions on Steam

• prepared 5 holiday animations for our social media pages

Thank you for the support! See you in the next year <3