Hello there everyone! 

Cake Quest is rapidly developing into the vision I had. So it was time to playtest this project. I wanted to see what people thought of the project in its current alpha state. Of course, when I am working on quality assurance and testing I try to make sure to do it as well as possible. So along the way I made graphs, calculations and forms. Let’s see what I found!

Overall Impressions 

The playtest landed a solid 7.8 from testers if the game would continue in its current trajectory, which is music to my ears. It's not just about numbers! This feedback is helping me understand the game's strengths and carving out a niche audience for targeted marketing. People told me they liked that the game is calm and quirky/funny!

Weapons? Trinkets? What they be?

Some players were a bit puzzled by trinkets, thinking they're regular gear. No worries! I've added clear notifications for trinket and weapon collection. Also, a shortcut from inventory to equip weapons? Done and done!

The testers sometimes also found weaponry to be confusing in its nature, not understanding the icons on the weapons. So I added some dialog to help solve that. It’s very important that people know the difference as a lot of the game depends on these mechanics.

Keeping the pace

Players loved the grind-free vibe, but the leveling up was a bit TOO speedy. I'm tweaking the XP gain to make the journey smoother and more engaging for the adventurers.

As you can see, there is now a clear bigger gap in between these two versions of XP distribution. This means that It takes me more encounters of my own level to level up! We went from 1,25 encounters to 2,25 encounters.

Wandering enemies got a mix of reviews on difficulty. Looking at peoples playthrough made it clear that there wasn’t enough of a gradual increase in difficulty. So after tweaking tons of enemy stats. Increasing difficulty in the later stages and decreasing it at the beginning. It seems fixed!  

Healing Hacks

Wrap your head around this. Saving at a savepoint also heals you up. I did not make that clear enough however, and people kept dying and not saving. Ending in catastrophic playthroughs. So a quick change of dialog here should do wonders.

Still, the testers found it difficult to stay alive. And because the roads weren’t particularly filled with save points, I decided to add something to the game that in hindsight seemed very obvious. Being able to use consumable items outside of battle!

This thing called game design is a big journey full of weird twists! Your feedback is my compass! It’s always welcome and I love playtesting to make the most of this game! Thank you for reading, and let’s make this game epic!

Mick Sengers - Cake Quest dev