Devlog #2: May Playtest Findings

What's up, punks! 👋🏽

It's Brenden. We had the week long playtest, and I went to A MAZE Berlin (I made a tiktok about it)to gather some feedback and it's been great!

Pictured here is my "Ohhh, tell me more~" face, and the back of Martin. (He made Nowhere Prophet, which I also worked on a little bit by writing some events. He is currently also working on a tactical deckbuilder called CROWNBREAKERS which you can play the demo now!!)

Of course, shout out to all the folks who filled out the questionnaires, who gave us feedback directly, who recorded their gameplay so we can really scrub over it. Thank you so much for playing and for all of your feedback, it's been incredibly helpful.

We've had about 70-80 people play in total and through our anonymous analytics, we can see how it all went. In fact, let's talk a little about the findings.

How You Played

During the week, you played on average for about 19 minutes. Enough to play a few matches, get to the first boss. However, a few folks went all the way to a few hours! This is roughly in line with what we expected, since it's such a simple version of the game, although it definitely makes it clear that the beginning needs a lot more variety already.

Most runs ended at the end of Act 1! And in fact, only 5 runs actually finished Act 2, with over half of you chose to go home at the end of Act 1. Since there's no meta progression, there's not much of a reason to continue. However, I'd like a much higher percentage of people continuing and risking it all, so I'll be making the meta progression incentives in a way that makes sure you folks need to continue to push your luck.

I don't wanna spend time making them look nice for this devlog, but we also have a bunch of data regarding specific enemies too. In general, the enemies are a little too easy right now. I'm relatively happy with the overall balance "curve", but some of the bosses are causing too many of you to abandon your run and some enemies are too tanky, making the fights too long, and I'll need to take care of that.

And of course, due to the power of defaults, only 36 runs out of 140 was using Prophet and Little Witch.

What's interesting is that I've gotten feedback from multiple people who's played a lot of card games that the game only clicked for them only after playing as Prophet! It's funny, I really notice that players who play less card games already feel the tension from the Lucky Punk deck. But some folks already want to feel that brinkmanship much earlier and really want to play around in that space. Totally fair.

So Lucky Punk's current deck will be changed up! Maybe he'll get Prophet's deck and I figure out something more fun for her.

Neat. So what's next?

Game development is an iterative process, so: we'll iterate!

I have gotten feedback that makes me want to do a whole bunch of work on the main match screen and change it all up, buuut the best thing to do right now is probably start on the meta-progression first and foremost to get some more lessons there. So that means working on the map generation, how we handle supplies, how we handle unlocking new characters, that kind of stuff.

Alright, I'm done for now. If you want more of us, we're about on TikTok, YouTube, BlueSky and Insta. We're also tabling at Dokomi, the anime convention in Düsseldorf on the 29th to 31st of May 2026, (we'll be there at their Games area) so say Hi to us if you're around!

Peace out, ✌🏽

Brenden