It’s update time!
The last months were super productive in many ways – StarBoost is way more in shape than it has ever been. And that is not a result of just “putting in the hours” but refinining the concept and game mechanics over and over again. We are now really at the point, where we can confidently say: StarBoost is a 360° action parcour racer. And then feel that ring true when you are on the the race track and playing.
Fantasies VS grinding a practical process
One big part of achieving that was narrowing down the game’s fantasy. What is it about, who are you as the player, what is the progression of the game, what does it feel like moment to moment, race to race during playtime? We found new answers that were not so clear to ourselves before. That shows that there really is great thruth in: you gotta love the process. That resulted in long discussions, finding ways to integrate the ideas and narratives into the game, boil it down to essentials so it fits into the scope of what we can and want to achieve as a micro team of two people. And then refining it more and more.
There probably are more iterations of that process ahead – but so far we love the result of what we achieved and what StarBoost currently is. In the daily grind we have to remind ourselves about that again and again – otherwise you lose yourself and all joy in an overflowing backlog of Todo items.
On to the milestones:
So the work last months was mainly focused in some key areas that I would identify as: User Experience, Progression Systems, UI Flow and last but not least: refining Game Mechanics. The latter goes hand in hand with Level Design, and there we did some major leaps forward. We found new ways and combinations of our gameplay elements, tried out new styles and layouts of creating race tracks and overall focused more on establishing a coherent and “cool” StarBoost look. Our means and assets are pretty limited, but the combination of new custom meshes and some shader tricks made the world much more coherent and in line of with what we had envisioned.
Playtesting
We refined a vertical slice with a selection of maps from the first planet ready to be playtested very soon. For that we will open up a steam playtest and – hopefully – receive some much needed feedback so we can iron out any hitches that might be in the way of a new player’s experience. We have a couple loyal playtesters who go in and test again and again, and we ourselves are testing a ton. BUT. There might be some issues we overlook out of familiarity with the game. This is a very dangerous zone to be in: you can make the game look good and how it actually should be working once you know it well playing yourself – but you as the developer just might not anticipate in how many funny ways players will break that. Knowingly or unknowingly 😉 This is our biggest focus right now: making it as approachable for new players as possible!
In one area I’m quite certain that we might find a better solution still – and that is input & controls. There are a couple pre-configured input schemes you can select from and the defaults are finetuned but here and there people say it could be better, especially using a gamepad, so we keep an eye out for how we could improve it.
We are preparing the last steps as I write this and will go into a Steam playtest soon.
Do you want to take part, test the game out and in doing so help us improve the game? Look out for the update directly on Steam – we’ll be announcing the playtest launch there and of course on the usual channels.
While that is going on, over the next weeks, we iterate more on the remaining races for the first planet and also experiment with looks and feels of how the others could look like.
That’s it for now. More updates soon!
As always: if you are interested in the game the best way to support development is wishlisting on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2471590/StarBoost/
Cheers,
your StarBoost Team!
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