Hey everyone! I'm Tyla Chadwick, the Lead Designer for Alchemic Crafter.

Since my last post for our game, we had our first electronic prototype. The electronic prototype is important so we can see where the game is at and what to adjust for our overall goals. Our electronic prototype wasn't entirely as far along as I would have hoped it to be, but with the creation of games, there are always learning experiences.  We did however get a significant amount of UI implemented as well as some Player Mechanics which I was very happy about.

We have since figured out what went wrong and what we could do better with the help of our playtests for the electronic build. I went out and gathered a total of 13 play testers through Discord channels, which was a higher amount of play testers than I was expecting. I also got some incredibly interesting results. 

One of my focuses for the playtest was I wanted to know player types and what the percentage is for each type. I was expecting that action-oriented would be the most popular category; however, the playtest results have proved me wrong. 84.6% of players actually enjoy adventuring the most and consider themselves to be adventurers. 

With this new information, I really thought hard about the direction we should go. When playing through personally I focused on how the adventure aspect of the game is and found that adventuring was a little lack lustered. I made the decision afterward that we should have more interesting exploration so that the Player can have a better and more enjoyable experience.

Staying within scope as much as I could, I decided that a fun route would be platforms with some sort of goal on the top to entice players to jump and explore. This a pretty straightforward process that I believe doesn't overly increase our scope since the level designers were looking for more work and wanted to work on more of the level design. 

This mechanic will not be implemented until our third build since we are still focusing on perfecting the home area due to a couple of setbacks. However, after talking with my producer, Anna, we are confident that we can bring this build direction to life before the ending build.

Other than the results with what type of players a person is, the other results were not necessarily accurate; due to my overlook of questions to ask during the survey and how they should be asked. I will have the survey questions more accurate and implemented for the next build.

However, the bugs mentioned are being addressed and should be fixed in the next build.

Common Bugs Were:

• Players could fall out of the world in some areas.
• Players could walk through mountains. 
• If the Player jumps into the water, there is no feasible way back out without encountering the first bug.
• The storage portal and inventory UI would open at the same time.
• The storage portal would not showcase the inventory on the first interaction.

These bugs, we are aware, caused a lot of player frustration, so it was our team's top priority to get most, if not all, of these issues addressed. To the play testers reading this designer blog post, I do sincerely apologize, and we are working to make it right.