Oh me oh my, it has come the time for us to be experience the beauties of QA.
Specifically, we’ve been hard at work wrapping up the Kickstarter backer beta build. For the past…I don’t even know how many weeks to be honest, we’ve been solving bugs, fixing soft locks, and tweaking things so it felt like a real game.
You know, sometimes, I still get shocked Snacko is a real game.
Anyways.
🌱 A New Beginning
Quite literally. The first part of the game was one of the first parts we worked on (duh), so I’ve always felt a bit…sussed by it. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t like how it threw you into an endless journey of dialogue for the first 15 minutes.
Now, you start off with a relatively short bit of text and straight into the tutorial where you can walk around and get a feel for the gameplay. Although we kept almost 90% of the content originally made for the intro, I’ve shuffled things around a bit and edited some dialogue to set up the rest of the game (in my humble opinion) better.
As I go through the rest of the game’s text to get ready for localization, I’ve been re-re-re-checking to make sure all of the lore and story flows together properly.
‘Cause, you know, I can’t keep my own lore straight.
📖 World Building
Speaking of lore, I’ve also made some small cosmetic changes and swaps to parts of the story. Snacko’s main story has undergone a couple of small changes while keeping pretty close to Mandy’s original plot outline for the game.
These are kind of small things, but they’re really important to me. I hope these small changes and improvements to the story makes the overall experience feel more polished!
💀 Bug Hell
Well, OK, now to the actual bulk of what we’ve been up to. Some of these aren’t even “bugs”, more like features that were never truly finished. One of the confusing bits of the minimap has been the player’s cursor’s direction being ambiguous. Well, now there’s an arrow! So I hope you won’t get lost!!
Real bugs aside, there’s small things from the bookshelf UI not being contained to the window properly, causing it to spill out the sides and become unreadable/unusable if your monitor or window wasn’t a perfect 16:9…
…to bigger bugs like…Nobu falling off the map continuously, banished forever to the Shadow Realm.
All in all, we probably squashed a little over 40 bugs of varying sizes and…intensity. Rest assured, Nobu is now safely in his house instead of falling until the end of time. Sometimes, to make sure we can easily debug issues, we end up with screenshots like this:
The debug default cobblestone texture wall from the depths of game development hell. Lovely.
Looking back, though, the game is in a much better spot. I’m pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished since August! I think I’m starting to get less anxious about Snacko as a real video game that real people (wow) are going to play!
This is how I feel…
Well, that’s all for this month! Hopefully, we can squish the last of the ugly bugs in the upcoming weeks and run the beta. Ahh, I’m so nervous. Imagine that, people actually playing the video game.
1. Fixed an issue where clicking on the inventory during battle could report an error, and the subsequent bugs that resulted. 2. Fix the bug that monsters and target monsters are not visible on the map. 3. Fix the bug that Scythe Strike can’t deal damage to the player. 4. Close the Black fog on the map. 5. Added the option to reset the character's position in the settings. 6. Change the effect of Lurking Corruption. 7. Players can now press and hold the mouse to move. 8. Fix an issue that Mana Drain doesn't fit its description. 9. Added hints to the locations of the note pages on Pond of Chaos. 10. Make QTE easier. 11. Players can now view the elf interface without elves.
Here are the Asteroid: Pre-SEASON v1.1.1 patch notes!
Fixed an issue with the daily log-in that prevented players from moving after closing all notification windows and redeeming daily rewards.
Added "Audio" section in Game Options. In this section, you can change the volume of the game music and sound effects.
Added "Information" section in Game Options. In this section it will be possible to view important information such as the user's Asteroid ID (a unique numeric code necessary to identify the player and which may be required in case of support), the game version installed on the system, copyright information and the Privacy Policy, accessible by scanning a QR Code from a smart device.
We have made a graphic restyle of all the main icons in the menu.
Extended single challenge event "Moon Stealer" until the release of Asteroid: The Burning Planet. Visit the "Events" section within the game menu.
Minor bugs fixed.
KNOWN ISSUES
We are investigating a store-related issue. Items would not change daily as expected in some cases.
We are investigating an Event related issue. The "Star Collector" Global Challenge Event would not correctly count the stars collected by players, resetting or completely changing the counter number shared with all players.
We are investigating a cursor problem. It would not correctly follow the position of the mouse pointer or the right analog stick (when using a controller) once it reached the edge of the screen, locking the cursor in that position for a short time.
COMING WITH THE NEXT PATCHES
A graphic restyle of the main menu is foreseen.
The initial loading screen will undergo some changes starting from version 1.1.2 (Pre-SEASON): we intend to display on the screen the news, the Events, the new spacecraft that can be purchased in the Store and other promotional information during the loading of the game. 'boot from the client, replacing the current loading screen. The loading screen will be updated constantly as new free updates arrive. The language of the text displayed on the loading screen will be English.
The social icons of Alestore Inc. will be added to the main menu with related links to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Discord.
The "Survey" function will be added to the extended menu. This feature will allow players to receive free in-game rewards by completing small user experience surveys.
The Options, currently available and modifiable only and exclusively in the main menu, can also be viewed in the extended menu during the game session. Note: initially some of the settings such as language and control mode will not be editable from the extended menu, and will therefore have to be changed from the main menu anyway.
New ships are coming for purchase in the Shop.
New Events are coming.
Bug fixes found in development and reported by users.
Since icosi-do is part of Steam's Next Fest this week, more people than usual might play the demo for the first time. For those who think that the demo is not challenging enough, this week's challenge provides three puzzles on level 7 that I personally find more difficult than the average puzzle on level 7.
The level codes are: 2226-07, 3361-07, and 3952-07.
To play these puzzles in the demo, you first have to unlock level 7 by solving puzzles on levels 1 to 6. Then you start a game with NEW GAME (in the main menu) and select CODE instead of a level to enter one of the codes. (Make sure that MOVE LIMIT is turned ON in SETTINGS > MODES.)
(If you are looking for more puzzles of this kind, you might be interested in the codes of the August Challenge: 1861-07, 4736-07, and 9962-07.)
Enjoy and please let me know what you think of the difficulty of these puzzles!
