Testing, Testing!

December 24, 2021

Just a small informational update regarding a couple of interesting news items. I can’t remember if I mentioned this on a previous post but there would come a time where if certain conditions were met like me searching for a composer, doing testing or releasing a trailer, then things would start moving at a very fast pace and then you-know-what would come shortly after!

Well, the first is that I have found a composer named Sergey Yukon who does really great work! It took me some time to find someone who could really capture the style and tone that I’m after (I’ve talked with several talented musicians before but nothing came to fruition) I was juuusst about to purchase some of his work too (it was in the shopping cart) but I thought of sending him an email to see if he would be interested in doing some custom work. It was just a shot in the dark and what was the harm in asking?

We spoke for a bit over email, hashed out the details and it was all good to go! He has actually been working on it for over a month and already has created some beautiful tracks. I would love to showcase it soon; perhaps in a future video!

The next is, I have begun testing outside of my local group and put together a small demo to gauge some reactions and opinions and I am happy (relieved more like it) that they have been great! It definately wasn’t perfect right out of the gate but I have gotten really solid critiques that should help me get closer to that goal. I plan to keep testing closed for the time being until I think it’s proper to release a public demo but if I find you lurking in the chatroom, who knows, I might just send you a PM about doing some testing! 😉

I am so glad that I did this NOW because just the mere process of packaging it and playing the game from an executable revealed dozens of small problems and issues that I overlooked (Speedtrees not animating like they do during PIE, missing asset redirects etc) These sorts of things would have been an absolute nightmare to deal with if I’d have to spend hours cooking/packaging the entire game first! Getting all those things out of the way at this point in time while the game is small means I won’t have to spend potentially weeks bug hunting months from now.

The feedback I got was golden, ALL OF IT. One of the testers even recorded a video of himself playing and discussing things as he went along and I have to say it’s a fantastic way to test! I didn’t think it neccessary at first but boy, my eyes have been opened. Not only were the insights useful but I was able to watch how he reacted to things onscreen, where he was and wasn’t looking, the paths he decided to take etc.

I managed to fix quite a few issues due to things I was noticing on his screen (which, hopefully he didn’t!) Things like intersecting meshes, clues that should have been obvious but weren’t, missing assets (Hey, there is supposed to be a bush there. Why isn’t it in the demo?!) They even pointed out some issues that would have never occured to me because of my monitor (HUD graphics not displaying properly on really wide-screens)

So overall I am damn happy I got this out of the way now and the general consensus is very positive. It runs well, the dynamic lighting is nice, atmosphere is on point and there are some genuinely scary/creepy parts to it! I plan to keep this testing going periodically as there are some parts later in the game that I’ll need more opinions on.

Though it still needed some tweaks here and there (which I’ve now addressed) it is well on its way to being the Out Of Hell game it was always intended to be. I managed to get a ton of things done in this month alone (tying up loose ends essentially) and even gave Donovan a sick fade, bro!!!