Ever since our first alpha back in the spring of last year, we've learned that the best way to improve a game is to receive feedback from real players and to continue iterating based on that feedback. Thank you so much for taking the time to help us make Dreamscaper the best game it can be. Furthermore, we are taking our cut of the revenue from the Supporter's Edition and putting it back into the development of Dreamscaper by hiring additional expertise to help us in certain areas.
Today we'd like to give you a look at our development process and to show you what we're doing to address a few of the common critiques we've found in our reviews:
Enemy Variety & Challenge
We know that there are some of you who have sunk dozens of hours into the game and find that a lot of of the enemies seen in the Prologue and Supporter's Edition are fairly simple to defeat by stun-locking. On the other hand, there are some of you who find that the enemies introduced in Hometown Part 2 introduce too much of a difficulty spike.
This is one of the challenges in releasing a small preview of a game when trying to cater to players of all skill levels. The Prologue Part 1 and 2 are tuned to levels 1 and 3 of an approximately 6-level experience that relies far more on damage and health scaling than the final game. In Dreamscaper, the earlier levels will be shorter, their difficulty curve will be more gradual, and there will be more formidable enemies in the upper levels that test your mastery of all the combat tools at your disposal.
Here is a sneak peak at one of these new enemies. We call him "The Bruiser":
As you can see, a knife only seems to annoy it. You will need to learn their attack patterns and weaknesses.
Sound Design
We have done our own sound design since day one, and while it's probably passable for a small indie title like ours, we agree with the feedback received that it's not one of our strengths. Thanks to the revenue of our Supporter's Edition, we are going to be hiring a professional Sound Designer to take this over. This will also free up Ian's time to focus on creating more gameplay content (enemies, items, attacks, etc).
Thank you!
Thank you again for all of your support throughout Dreamscaper's development. We are very happy with the response to our Prologue, but we are still pushing ourselves to make the final product one of the best games of 2020.
If you have additional feedback for us, we are often found interacting directly with our players over on our Official Discord Server. Don't be afraid to pop your head in and say hi!
Cheers,
Rob, Ian and Paul
