A Combat Accessibility Fork
An amazing thing happened in the last stretch of our Mexico work trip! We released a Friends and Family build and the feedback was hugely positive and also very thorough! Now I have a very liberal approach to feedback; if it can be implemented, played with, and marinated on without disrupting the flow of the project I will do it on principle, provided I haven't already explored the issue previously. There have been many minor (and major) pieces of feedback that have improved the game and I think it's a good, albeit authorially uncomfortable policy. Not every piece of feedback is valuable and is worth investigating, but in my experience, MOST are. I wanted to write about this fascinating fork I'm standing at right now with the appeal of the scrappers on one side and the appeal of the masters on the other.
God Damn You, Devil May Cry!
Earlier this week I sent out a very early build of Aztez to a handful of friends. I chose these particular people primarily for their intelligence and articulation but also for their varying skill levels across different types of games. Mind you, there is little to no ACTUAL game in place just yet. I was simply looking for feedback on the basic sensation of the existing attacks but also on the difficulty of execution for two of the combos I had built on a Gap Timing mash flow, inspired by the elegance of Devil May Cry. The feedback that came back to me was fascinating; no one liked it or could do it reliably. No one except two people.