For Beta our big challenge was…making an actual game! To that end we had to take all of the tools, features, and assets we’ve created and stitch together some actual gameplay content. The result is a short, pretty simple mystery for the player to solve with a clear setup and objective, a representative investigation, and a definitive conclusion.

This Beta product is a big step in the right direction for us because we can start doing real playtesting on a phone to get a better idea of people’s expectations and impressions of our ideas. Having more well-defined content also means we can do more targeted polishing of assets and features.

Demo video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WqWKih2ruY817MwBWtdaL7Mclx9nN1Ia/view?usp=share_link

Beyond content, another big success of this development cycle was getting VPS working. We are now confident in our ability to locate our game wherever we’d like and more specifically in Black Chairs. We’ve also found that we can extend the scene beyond a small area without too much difficulty, which gives us more flexibility in writing content going forward.

For assets, we worked on wireframing UI elements and have gotten a few assets created, specifically for the journal interface. We also set up real idle animations for all the characters and created a few props and added some texturing details to characters to facilitate the newly written content for the game.

Our next steps will be heavily informed by the playtesting we’ll be doing this week but at a high level we’ll be iterating on the plot and adding more wrinkles for players to work through during their investigation. This will require more specific props and details to be created by the art team, who will otherwise be focused on polishing current assets and supporting other teams development. The other big push in the near future will be getting more UI assets in and iterating on them.