Closed Testing has begun! (Get your Steam key)
Written by Klaus Kääriäinen
The design of Hypersensitive Bob has taken some jumps into various different directions. The core mechanics of the game is pretty much the same, the bigger questions is that how we want to present those to the player.
For example, the levels and their order has been on the table for some time now. Should we have a level selection? Or maybe the levels pop up by random? Do we need to divide the levels into different episodes? And so on.
Whatever we decide for the levels, is one of the biggest feature for replayability of the game. If the game is a monotonous pipe the player goes through every time, they won’t most likely play it again.
In the current build we have divided the levels into “Tiers”. So when the player starts the game, they will obviously start from Tier 1. Every tier has a pool of different levels and the system picks one level from the Tier pool by random. At Tier 1, the levels are easier, than on Tier 5 for example. First we thought that “hey, let’s just dump all the levels into one pool and call it done”. But by doing that, the player could end up getting very difficult levels at the beginning, or vice versa. Right now the Tier system feels like a good idea, let’s see what playtesters think of it!
Hypersensitive Bob is a game which we want players to explore for a long period of time. So the focus is to make as many play throughs unique as possible. Some of the content is also unlocked by playing, doing the right task in certain level, or just bumping into it with pure luck.
We may have loads of good and unique content, but if we present it in a wrong way, we may have a crappy game. Players either discover all the content in couple of hours and starts to feel that the game is repetitive, or we don’t give more stuff to explore fast enough.
I guess the only way to do this properly, is to playtest the game as much as possible!
So, let’s get to the point: Would YOU be interested in testing Hypersensitive Bob and build the game into right direction? If yes, send email to petri(at)sieidi(dot)com. Just give him a heads up that you’re interested, that’s all you need to do. We will pick more and more people for the test rounds during the coming weeks. You only need functional steam account to join the test. We will send you the key when you’re picked.
That’s it for now, it would be really awesome to see you helping us develop Hypersensitive Bob! Grab a demo, play the game, give us feedback and follow us on the media of your choice. (Links below)
Cheers,
Klaus