Weekly Recap – Week of 9/6

​Yeah, yeah, we’re a bit late this week. It’s because we were busy playtesting! You heard me right, we finally dusted off TTS and had a couple playthroughs for the first time in almost a month and a half. It took us a solid minute to get back in the hang of things (and to explain all of the changes to our playtesters, bless their souls), but it was smooth sailing after that!
 
As mentioned in last week’s update, we realized that we needed to revamp both our map and our main adversary and spent the majority of the past two weeks doing that. We ended up deciding to put the tutorial-specific map and adversary on the backburner for now and focus on converting our existing map and adversary to make those tutorial-friendly.
 
I think we underestimated just how much we were going to change the adversary, since they went through a complete overhaul last week. Our first couple of playtests with the revised adversary went well, and we plan on continuing to revise them as we get more playtests under our belt.
 
The map itself didn’t change all that much, but the way in which you progress through the map certainly did. In some ways, we actually went back to how the map used to be when we were first getting started. The map initially had two phases, where you had to complete the first phase before you could escape. We decided to go back to that playstyle and the initial results have been promising.
 
In other exciting news, I used my 3D printer for the first time in what seemed like months to print out our first physical version of the flashlights! Aside from my terrible tracing skills, they turned out quite well and will allow us to perform our first physical playtests (safely, of course). Here they are in all their glory:

​We also signed a contract with our board and box artist, so we’re excited to get some more artwork to share with everyone. We’re also still going back and forth with manufacturers on different aspects of production, so we’re continuing to progress towards our goal of launching our Kickstarter early next year.
 
We hope to have a tutorial version ready to send out soon, so keep an eye out for communication once that’s ready to go!
 
Until next time,
 
Jeremy