Wild Chorus Playtest Update 01
What did you all think?
Time for our first Substack playtest update! Huge thanks to everyone who has played and submitted feedback so far. If you haven’t signed up and would still like to play, you can fill out the form below. We’ll send you a Steam key or download link.
If you did ask for a key and didn’t get one, check your spam folder. If it’s not there, respond to this email and we’ll get you sorted.
Feedback so far
We’ve had some really helpful (and heartening) responses. Here’s some of the most common things we’ve heard:
The positives ❤️
World building / Characters / Dialogue
Art style
Music style
Freedom of musical creation as a core mechanic. Many people said they want even more of this. Which is awesome to hear.
Cleaning up Silence feels satisfying
The, shall we say, areas of improvement 😮💨
The Drum instrument mechanic is clunky. Almost every single person commented on this – you are not alone haha. More on this later in this post.
Greater understanding of which instrument is required when. AKA AFFORDANCE
Health system is whack. We know. We hate it too. We have thoughts.
Feature requests 🧪
A MAP
Deeper dive on lore
A chance to sit and play music freeform with the sound sprites. This one realllllly excites me, personally. I’ve been wanting to mess around with this, but haven’t really been able to justify putting in the time, since we had bigger problems to solve. I can’t wait to try this out.
Spotlight on The Drum mechanic
This is one of those mechanics that we have iterated on maybe 10 different times now. Each time it improves juuuuust a bit more. And tbh I thought with this last one we had nailed it. But in getting your feedback and watching new people try it, it’s still not. quite. right.
But! We realized it wasn’t necessarily a problem with the mechanic itself… it was the way the timing was communicated. People were (understandably) treating the bar as a paddle to bounce the star with. They were pushing the button early to make the “paddle” rise to meet the star.
So I designed a few different versions of the timing indicator, tested with various folks who had tried the old one… and it seems to be much improved. It’s still skill-testing, but not so much that players wonder why they’ve failed the timing.
Before:
After:
But you can be the judge! I’ve pushed out the updated drum to Steam. You can grab it and try out, if you like. I’d be curious to hear if it’s feeling better.
What’s next?
Right now, we’re focused on wireframing out what will ultimately be our Steam demo release. We did a team sprint, talking through a few options for the world layout.
Here’s a teaser that I don’t expect anyone to be able to digest:
Once we pick a direction (or more likely some combination of the two), I’ll jump back into Unity, greybox it and get some local folks to test it.
I’m also playing with a few new mechanic prototypes, like this melody tracing mechanic Opie could use to teach a song to sound sprites. 🌟🌟🌟
Then it’s onto creating some of the mechanics you all have requested (Map + Free Jazz moment shortlisted).
More to come soon!
What we’ve been playing: Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip
Credit to Amanda for digging this one up.
This game asks the question “What if Grand Theft Auto was set in an absurd town where the main character doesn’t want to become a crime kingpin, but just wants to collect enough turbo stuff to drive his taxi cab into space?”
It’s a game design lesson in not trying to make things make sense and just doing things because they make you laugh.
Perform important tasks to get junk. ex: beat kindergartners at a game of soccer, but the ball is a big squishy orange. Turn that junk into turbo for you taxi. Get to space so you don’t have to worry about getting good grades anymore.
It’s maybe a 4 hour experience. Short and sweet and Terry’s voice “lines” will leave you grinning a big goofy grin the whole time.