Decorating the levels

Hello Caesura watchers! It’s been a little over a week since the first playable version of the game was uploaded to Steam. I want to talk a little about what feedback we’ve heard, what we’re doing about it, and what’s next for Caesura.

First, we’re not really sure how many people have played the game. We know that over 150 people have requested the playtest (we said “yes” to everyone. We assume a lot of them are bots). There are currently 16 people in the playtest channel on our Discord server.

Some general feedback we’ve gotten is:

• It’s moderately hard to learn. It takes some practice to learn how to perform actions on the beat. Most players succeed after about 10-20 minutes. It’s really important that you have the soundtrack turned up, as there aren’t very many visual cues.
• A couple of players have gotten stuck. Either they aren’t able to figure out the platform jumping rules, or we find out that we didn’t explain ladders properly. This doesn’t happen when you playtest in person (because one of us can tell you what you need to do), but we need the tutorial to be a bit clearer about some things.
• Some of the actions are a bit confusing. I don’t think anyone’s figured out what the castanets are for unless someone tells them.

That said, the game appears to be playable, and players can beat it with a few hints. If they haven’t gotten any hints, they’re liable to get stuck.

One thing you may have noticed is that the play test levels are not as heavily decorated as some of our earliest screenshots. The background is black, and the tiles are mostly simple rock patterns. This was on purpose. Decorating the levels (with crystals, gears, mushrooms, background scrolling layers, etc.) is a really slow process. We want to make sure that the area is playable and interesting before we dump several hours into adding decorations and backgrounds. If we decorate an area and then later rip it out, all that time spent decorating is wasted. Each room takes several hours to decorate!

The screenshot I’ve attached to this post gives you an idea of what it will look like in future–there are foreground and background layers, as well as crystals and other decorations in the cave. I expect we’ll still be tweaking some of the jumps and layouts for months to come, but we’re starting to gradually make things prettier. I’m especially interested in figuring out how to speed up the decoration process. None of us are working on the game full-time, so we need to be efficient with our efforts.

I also spent some time this week learning about how files work in our engine. We’re using files to automate some simple tasks (like figuring out how many collectibles have been placed in each area) and we will need them to work for saving and loading the game. Currently, you have to start over every time you play; that’s no big deal when the game is only 10 minutes long, but we expect it to become more annoying over time.

I hope you’ve been enjoying the game so far. Let us know what you want to see next!