Playcrafting Summer Expo
The last time we showed off The Painter’s Apprentice at a Playcrafting event, we didn’t have it on mobile devices and there were a lot of problems with the responsiveness of our jumps and UI. After showing it off at the summer expo, we’re a lot more confident in the direction of our game thanks to the positive reception and constructive feedback we received. Many of the problems that stood out to players we haven’t even noticed, especially since we have been playing the game for so long. Some of the issues people noticed are:
- Jump button registering upon release of jump button not on tap – leads to feeling of lag and unresponsiveness
- Dash button shouldn’t be attached to directional arrows as people often dash to their death when edging to the corner of a cliff.
- Loading screens need to be implemented (we’re already working on this one)
- Updating color picker method (we’re already working on this one too!)
Overall, most people really enjoyed the overall concept, artwork and general gameplay. We’re getting much closer to perfecting our user experience. Once we implement and test out some new UI, we’ll be ready to start a closed beta testing. Speaking of which, we’ll likely be ready in a few months so if you’re interested in being a beta tester and shaping our games and level design email contact [at] luminositymobile [dot] com.
We also found some other really cool games at the Playcrafting Summer Expo that you should keep an eye on including:
- Heart Catcher – by Emma Larkins. A two player card game based on bluffing. Release date Q1 2016.
- DestinyQuest Infinite – by Adventure cow. An interactive gamebook
- Cultus – by CRAM Games. A card building game where you built up your cult to gain credibility. The person to get to 12 credibility wins.
Playcrafting has been one of the major indie game supporters in the past few years, so we were super excited to hear other groups are picking up the mantle to support indie devs. One group we found was Kill Screen. They do events every couple months at the Ace Hotel in New York. Hopefully we can show off The Painter’s Apprentice there as well to increase our reach.
This past week we’ve been experimenting with the UI and cleaning up a couple issues. Our biggest hurdle is still finding the perfect color picker method that is both intuitive and fast. I We’ve finally come up with an option that I think will definitely make the gameplay much smoother. We’ll be posting screenshots of these in the near future on our social media sites, so be sure to check us out on Twitter and Facebook!