Closed Beta Results & Infographic!

Hi Steam Community! We just ran our first Closed Beta. If you missed it, you can still download the demo AND sign up for the next one at epiphanycity.com/demo.

This post is long enough to warrant its own Table of Contents. So buckle up, here's what we got:

1. Infographic

2. Roadmap of Development (including our next Beta test!)

3. Some Unfortunate News

Infographic + Survey Results

In general, most people enjoyed the puzzles, story, art, dialogue, music, and characters. Which kinda sounds like everything? Except there were tons of technical complaints, like the clunky grid-based movement, lack of volume sliders, no "Quit" button on the title screen, etc. But for now, we are more than happy that we hit all the big stuff, and will continue to work on those smaller technical fixes... although you might want to read the last section of this post.

Steam post image

Development Roadmap

Epiphany City is roughly split into 8 sections:

1. Intro / Opening Scenes

2. Museum (aka what you played in the Prologue)

3. Yellow Fields + Ocean Beach

4. Town Gate + Sky Mountain

5. Mischief Managed

6. Bloom National Park

7. Dark Forest

8. Ending

The next playtest will include sections 3-6. If you do not want any of the game spoiled, I recommend holding off on this test because this is the meat of the game and therefore the majority of the gameplay. While we expect to have this ready by the end of June, we've pretty much never been perfectly on time with our deadlines so it's probably going to be a bit later than that.

We also plan to test and iterate on the final areas of the game, so if you're an exceptionally brave soul that doesn't mind seeing an ending-in-progress, this might just be your moment.

Some Unfortunate News and My Apologies

So if you haven't looked through the infographic already, one of the biggest complaints (in fact, the biggest complaint by far) was that the movement was too clunky.

The main issue here is that there is no input buffering on the movement. This means that you can't input any button commands until Lily has fully reached the next tile she's moving to. There are many, many more ways to improve a game's movement, but this is the big one.

Unfortunately at this point in development, it's extremely unlikely that we'll be able to add that in, for the following reasons:

1. We were complete noobs when we first started working on Epiphany City (just finished computer science degree, first game ever, never used Unity before, etc).

2. All of the groundwork/framework for Epiphany City was done when we were complete noobs.

3. I personally told our programmer to hack together the fastest prototypes he could make, because we wanted the fastest "iterate > test > iterate > test" cycle possible (as this is generally the best way to make a good game)

4. We always planned to go back and fix the movement, but since Epiphany City has zero need for quick reflexes or precise movement, we kept pushing it back and eventually the project got too big for us to completely start over (currently at ~50,000 lines of code and wishing we could travel back in time and yell our younger selves)

5. I feel especially bad for this because more than anything, we want to be the developers who listen to their fans and do everything they can to help them enjoy the game. Now of course we wouldn't have gone to such lengths to ask for your brutally honest feedback if we didn't plan on updating and improving the game, but still I felt the need to be upfront about this earlier rather than later.

So TL;DR, I am very sorry, please forgive our team, I promise your feedback is super valuable and we will improve all the other stuff you asked for, but this one thing would require us to remake the entire game so we might not be able to do it.

___________

To close this out, I'll leave you all with a quote from an email that really gave me hope and made my day:

David, I can’t leave a steam review yet, since the prologue isn’t officially out, so I’ll leave what I would have posted in this email for now. I was initially put off by the simplistic look of the game—how it played, the character designs/art style. I wouldn't have even considered looking more closely at this game if not for knowing who was involved in its creation. However I was genuinely very impressed by the quality of the puzzles. The dialogue is lighthearted and silly but the story looks like it will take its themes a little seriously. The music is beautiful and a joy to listen to. It honestly looks like a wonderful little game. I'm excited to play more when the game fully releases. ~ [Name hidden for privacy] Retired Smash Competitor

If you made it all the way to the end, you're a true fan and our team couldn't be more blessed to have you with us. I'm glad that this is interesting enough and I'll work hard so that you can enjoy Epiphany City as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading, - Dave