Dev Diary №1: Playtest Results & Next Steps

Hello! This is Ivan - Studio Director of Fantastic Signals.

It’s been a little over two months since our reveal. We’ve been busy analyzing the playtest feedback and locking our development plans. It’s time to share some of them with you. But first of all – a huge thank you to everyone who followed the game and participated in the playtest!

The announcement has exceeded our wildest expectations! As I write this, the total number of wishlists has surpassed 270,000.

(That's quite a lot! We made it into the top-150 most-wishlisted games on Steam)

The playtest we ran in September turned out to be extremely valuable both in quantity and quality of feedback.

We were able to confirm many ideas, test hypotheses, and see how you actually play the game. This feedback helps us make The Lift deeper, clearer, and, importantly, more pleasant to play.

So if I didn't say this convincingly enough at the beginning, HUGE THANK YOU for your attention to our game, your support, and your participation in development by joining the playtest!

I want to launch this dev diary series so that I, along with other folks from Fantastic Signals, can share with you how development is going, what decisions we're making, and what all of this means for the final game that will end up in your hands.

I want to dedicate the first issue to the playtest results, what we learned from it, and what we're going to do about it.

Playtest Results

So let's look at something truly exciting - GRAPHS!

11,063 people have filled the feedback survey, and yes, we really did read everything you wrote.

One of the first pieces of good news was that almost 80% played for more than 1 hour, and almost half played for MORE THAN THREE HOURS (considering we thought the average completion time for the playtest build should be 1.5 hours). This means you played until the very end of the build (and some even way beyond that), and that's really cool.

Now our task is to understand what works best and what needs improvement for release.

What Works Well:

Interactions

One of our very first prototypes wasn't even a level, but just a "wall" with different buttons, switches, and other interactive elements that could appear in the game. A sort of "sensory wall" for toddlers.

We didn't stop until we achieved that level of "tactile satisfaction" where you want to press everything, because we understood that this very first level of "touch" between the player and the game world would play a key role in immersing players in the "handyman" fantasy.

We're glad you enjoyed it, and we'll try to create as many interesting in-game things for you to interact with as possible for the game's release.

Repair

A game about a handyman is nothing without a good feeling of repair, and we're very happy to see that players enjoy digging into our devices and restoring the environment.

We weren't sure how easy it would be to figure out the modular repair system for internal systems of each device, but the playtest showed that aside from a few nuances (which we'll definitely address), you were able to figure it out and even enjoyed it! We also noticed that many of you liked fixing the environment – furniture and small interior details. As well as organizing things on shelves! We'll definitely strengthen this aspect in future builds.

What Can Be Improved:

Inventory

We initially knew that the UI and inventory in the playtest were in a raw state, and your feedback confirmed this.

We're now completely rethinking the inventory system and interaction with items in your hands to make it faster, more intuitive, and visually more pleasant.

When we have a new stable version, we'll definitely show what it looks like in action.

Pacing

You left a lot of detailed feedback in "free form" from which we drew several more important conclusions:

Resources, batteries, and the wavemeter

• Some of you left feedback with suggestions to improve our resource system to make it more transparent and convenient for the player.

The resource system we showed in the playtest was more "transitional" and didn't meet the expectations for game flow that we have for the final game. We're already working on refining it for the next playtest (more on this below).

Task Journal ("B.U.G.")

• Some tasks in the journal were worded too "gamey" and broke the overall atmosphere.

We want the B.U.G. to feel not like a quest log, but like a "handyman's work list" compiled after assessing breakdowns – with natural logic and context.

We're currently testing a new task structure that will allow players to better feel their progress and the sequence of repairs.

What's Next?

We've already started implementing changes based on your feedback and will talk in detail about each area of the game in the following dev diaries.

Our goal is not just to show what we're doing, but also to explain why we're making certain decisions (and of course show lots of cool GIFs and pictures!)

Here's a teaser of the updated Glue Gun effect (you'll be able to fix more stuff – not just holes in the walls!)

In parallel, we're actively working on new content: new Institute floors, new devices, and new ways to bring them to life.

Each floor in The Lift is a separate "restoration story," and our task is to make each one feel real, alive, and full of interesting details.

Here's an (incomplete) list of possible topics we’re planning to cover in future dev diaries:

• Working on story, dialogue, quests, and overall narrative pacing

• Creating environment objects and breaking them for the player to repair

• Game balance, resources, and creating the "flow" state for the player

• UI/UX, world interaction, and all about the ‘layer between the player and the game’

• The art style – why does The Lift's world and characters look the way they do?

What else would you be interested in learning about? Let us know!

New Playtests

We're planning to run a series of very limited, closed playtests exclusively with our community. These playtests will start very soon. If you want to have the opportunity to participate and help us even more with developing The Lift, join our Discord and follow the news:

https://discord.gg/jeTj5wzhk3

Stay tuned, we're preparing many more cool updates! And don’t forget to add The Lift to your Steam wishlist – let’s see if we can reach 300k by the end of the year!

Ivan,

Studio Director, Fantastic Signals