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Memody: Sindrel Song - Testing (UPDATE: v0.06 BETA)

6 years ago2,930 words

Gasp, Memody: Sindrel Song testing is finally upon us! I've set up this blog post to include a list of issues I'm working on or aware of, and I think it could be useful if you - the testers - could provide your feedback in the comments section here so then it's all in one place.

Thanks to those of you that have volunteered! A nice number of you did; not a stressful amount, but hopefully enough to gather useful and varied impressions. As I write this, I've yet to finish actually uploading the thing due to a few hurdles, but I'll send out emails when it's available to play (hopefully I'll have already got to that point by the time you read this). I'm doing the testing on something called ∞ Kartridge ∞, a modern offshoot of Kongregate, which I'd like to explore more myself once this is out and I'm not as likely to be discouraged by the competition. If you already have a Kongregate account, you'll have to use that.

(It's strange going back there after years away, like revisiting a life I feel I left long ago... I notice my profile said I was working on a continuation of MARDEK - presumably the Taming Dreams app - so I wonder whether that played any role in making people think MARDEK 4 was likely to happen, hmm.)

I want to make it clear that I'm not just looking for coldly technical bug reports. I'm far more interested in hearing about your experience, how you feel about it. Is it fun? Frustrating? Are you moved? Confused? Overwhelmed? Immersed? Do any bits particularly impress you? Amuse you? Make you uncomfortable? And I'm interested in your experience, not just what you think hypothetical 'people' might feel about things. I'm interested in all those things as well - anything you say will be valuable and I'll appreciate it - but we can speculate all day about how people might perceive things, so it's much more valuable to hear how real people actually do.

Also, I'd prefer a ton of short comments about any little details you notice as you notice them, rather than huge reports written at the end. Or if you don't want to post every thought that comes to mind here as it arises, perhaps you could make a text document and add them to that as you go, which you'd add here at the end of your session? In the past I had a chatroom thing set up alongside beta versions for this purpose, because hearing realtime feedback is so much more valuable than an after-the-fact considered assessment, but obviously I've not got that this time, so this comment section will have to do. So post many times if you have a lot of observations to make! I'll be sure to check the spam filter to see if it has an issue with that.

And don't pay attention to what other people are saying. Multiple people reporting the same things is valuable, so I wouldn't want someone to refrain from saying certain things because they've already been pointed out.

Oh, and if you missed the previous post but you're interested in volunteering, there's no time limit on that, so I'll be checking comments there and emails and stuff; you haven't missed your chance!

I'm anxious about how this'll go, but I'm also hoping that those of you who are testing will actually get some genuine enjoyment out of the game. I certainly enjoy it, so I hope you do too!

UPDATE: v0.02 BETA

Thanks again to those of you who've played the game and given feedback! I've been quite tense and have done little other than await feedback, since I've worked on this for ages and really wanted to know what people thought of it, so I've been responding to it with maybe too much eagerness! Now that the initial excitement has largely worn off - and the game's survived a day without anything terrible happening and without getting "what the hell is this?" negative reactions - I've been able to calm down and work on making some changes based on what's been reported so far.

There's some polishing yet to do - mostly animations and painting the skies - but I think I'll give myself a rest until Monday. Until then, I'll be checking issues that are reported, and I'll upload these updates when anything significant has changed.

I think I've uploaded it correctly to Kartridge, but it involved replacing the current game file rather than a separate 'add update' interface, so I hope it prompts you to actually download an update.

In this first update, I've made the following changes:

* You can now quit from within the game by pressing ESC to bring up a menu; press ESC again to confirm. I neglected to add something like this because I'd never played in full screen before; I thought the graphics would scale up poorly. They don't actually look that bad now that I've tested it, though they were obviously made for smaller screens where the crudeness of the models wouldn't be as visible (also there's an issue with the outline shader that I'll talk about in more detail later maybe); I might try improving them at some point if I can, adding more polygons in the faces, smoothing some things out or adding detail. I immediately understood from playing in full screen why multiple people mentioned this quitting issue. I wasn't sure of the best way to go about it; I did it this way rather than having a button in a settings screen or something so then you can quit from anywhere quite easily, but if it's unintuitive or there's a better way I could have gone about it, I'm very open to suggestions!

* Speaking of full screen mode, I've made a fix to some GUI elements in the lore section (and on the Alora Fane splash screen) which makes them scale with the screen size like the rest of the GUI. It looks like I've blown them up for an arbitrary reason, but this is what they were meant to look like; the smaller version was a bug.

* I've made it so that the Singing Tips appear before the intro, as well as after several failures like before. I've also added an extra page with some minor notes, with room for more if anything comes up.

* Some testers reported specific issues that seemed to affect just them, which are more difficult to fix if I can't replicate them. I think I've fixed an issue where there was an issue at the end of the intro which caused the first cutscene to be loaded improperly, but I can't test it so I can't be sure.

That's it for now; thankfully there wasn't really anything major I had to change! I'll continue reading the feedback when it comes and making changes based on it!I feel energised to be finally getting through this phase!





I've been looking into some of the weirder errors that have been reported, and I suspect that they're related to the quality settings you select at the start. I hadn't even played the game on anything but the highest settings because I never had any issues with them, which was a big oversight! I'll look into them over the weekend.

If you do experience any bugs, please let me know what graphics setting you're using! Or even better, see if it still happens if you change to different settings.

(I'll continue adding to this post every time with new updates.)

UPDATE: v0.03 BETA

I've been really impressed by the quality of the feedback so far! It's calmed down a bit now, but I suppose it is the weekend. I've been responding to comments because it helps me to go over things in detail like that, and I don't want anyone to feel like their words are going unheard, but there are some I've yet to get around to because I was hit by depression pretty hard today, completely out of the blue. So that's been great. I had a bunch of game twaeks I had planned, too, and I've only managed to get a few of them done. Instead I spent too long worrying about my future. SIGH!



The changes I did get around to making though are small, but fairly significant; I feel they've drastically altered the difficulty of the game, perhaps even too much! I suppose it'll be a challenge finding the right balance for the difficulty.

The main things I've added are:

* You can now regenerate hearts by successfully completing melody sections! The amount that a heart fills depends on the accuracy grade you get for that section. How I imagine it working is that if you're playing well but make a couple of mistakes, you can easily recover, but it might not make much difference if you're playing sloppily and making constant mistakes anyway. Let me know if it makes a difference to your experience anyway; since it's new, I'll likely have to tweak it at least a bit.

* Some sections are now marked with a letter, and their corresponding duets are marked with the same letter. It's not a perfect way of letting you know what's coming up, but it's hopefully better than nothing? (I still need to update the tips thing to mention these two things!)

* I've also decreased the strictness of the accuracy grade calculations, but only by a tiny, tiny amount. It makes it easier to get 200%, but likely won't matter much on your first runs through songs.

* I've added some behind-the-scenes code that dumps a whole lot more information than before, so if you encounter issues, the logs will be more helpful to me. I still don't know what's causing some of the particularly weird bugs - like that one where the camera is massively out of place - but hopefully this should help me fix them! I did make some minor changes that might have resolved some of the Null Reference errors, but I don't know, since I couldn't reproduce them in the first place. Oh, except one from playing notes right at the end of the song; I'm fairly sure I've fixed that one.

Hopefully this hasn't introduced any new bugs, but if you find any, let me know!

It doesn't sound like anyone's got very far into the game yet, so I hope at least some of you stick with it! Thanks again though for all the feedback; I don't know if you believe from playing it that this game could do well, but at least hearing your comments is helping me feel that I haven't completely wasted my time hopefully maybe perhaps?!?

UPDATE: v0.04 BETA

Another update! I wanted to have this one done much sooner, but depression hit hard these past few days, which is always a lovely thing. I think I mentioned that already somewhere? Annoying, anyway; I wanted to reply to as many comments as I could, but there were a few I didn't get around to because of this. Sorry if yours was one of the ones I've yet to reply to! I'll go through them again tomorrow and hopefully reply to some more.



This update contains a major change: three difficulty modes! There were a lot of ways I could have gone about this, as I talked about in the previous post, and this one was based on brainstorming and testers' comments. The three modes are Casual, Challenge, and Expert. I went with 'Casual' rather than a 'Practice' mode because some people might not want the challenge of the assessed mode at all, and this allows them to see the story in a way that's hopefully not off-putting to them. You have infinite lives, your score isn't assessed, and you can pass stages this way. If you do, their nodes are marked with a tick rather than a percentage. The current gameplay is still in there, in Challenge mode. Since you choose the difficulty every time you start a song, you can mix things up; maybe some people would start with Casual before switching to Challenge, or vice versa, or some might do a full run in Casual before challenging themselves in a replay. There are many ways it can go.

Either way, you're still having to accurately mimic the melodies to progress through the song, it's just that one requires going back through already-completed sections, while the other doesn't.

I've tested it as much as I think I need to, but it won't surprise me if there are issues with it! If you find any, let me know! It's also very much open to change, so I'm interested in any thoughts about that.

There are some other changes too:

* You can have Memody sing with herself at her tent (during times when there's not a cutscene there). There's not much to this at the moment, but I could potentially add to it. I wasn't sure what to do with that area when you revisited it, and I'd been intending to add a 'freeform mode' since the start, so this addresses both of those things.

* I've changed the key input a bit, most notably adding a key for pausing. This doesn't actually work at the moment, except in the 'freeform' bit, where it causes it to end. Because of how I had to do this, you'll need to reconfigure your keys if you're loading an old save file.

(Speaking of which, just to be absolutely sure, you might want to create backups of your save files before updating. There shouldn't be any disruptions to you, but it's better to be safe than sorry. They're .txt files in the folder C:|Users|(username)|AppData|LocalLow|Alora Fane|Sindrel Song. They'll be converted to illegible binary for the final release. The game automatically creates backups, but it needs work so I wouldn't rely on it at this point.)

* I've made a few minor aesthetic changes like button roll overs, etc, that more than one person mentioned.

* The wording of the tips is condensed and clarified.

* Switching between dark/light modes now works differently: if you tap quickly, it works like before, but if you hold they key down, it'll revert when released. Useful for if you only need to play one note from the alternate mode.

Oh, and there's still that really weird bug that causes the camera to be massively offset, and the tutorial to end after the first note. I've added some more data dumps to the related code, so if you could reproduce that (I can't) and send me the log, that'd help! I hope.

There are also a lot of issues related to lower graphics settings (the ocean's missing, for example), so that's something I need to get around to.

So yes, that's that for now! I'll continue checking (and hopefully replying to) comments, and I have a huge list of little changes I want to make based on what people have said which I'll be working through over the coming days. I need to do other things like adding an ending and proper animations, too. So I've still got a lot to do.

If you were struggling to get very far before, the new difficulty settings might open a whole lot more of the game up for you!

UPDATE: v0.05 BETA

This update just fixes an issue introduced in v0.04, where the wintrels said their repeat attempt dialogue when choosing to sing with them, so you missed out on a chunk of the script.

UPDATE: v0.06 BETA

A second update for today with some relatively minor but maybe important changes?



* You can now PAUSE during songs! I think it works alright, but it was more tricky than you might expect, and there might be some issues with it. Let me know if you find any! Eventually you'll be able to end the song from this menu as well. Originally I intended to have it act as if you'd failed the current section when you unpaused, though you wouldn't lose a life, but I felt that could be too easily abused, so now it just resumes exactly where you paused. Awkward, but it seems like the lesser of two evils.

* The ocean should appear on lower graphics settings, but let me know how this works for you. I'll have to look into it if it cripples performance. Apparently it was invisible before because shadows were disabled on lower quality settings, and [technical explanation blah blah blah]. Shadows are likely quite intensive, so including them all all might present performance issues. Let me know how it goes!

* I fiddled around with some other (invisible, technical) performance-related things that might actually increase speed though, so I'm interested to hear if they make a difference.

* I've added an options menu, accessible from the cog, with several options. They're mostly accessible from elsewhere, but I felt this addressed some of the specific feedback comments. I'm interested to hear whether it's intuitive to close that menu or not.

* Remedy's a bit pinker now. I also lightened Vivace's eyes. This took eight hours. I'm not lying.

* I might have fixed the weird bug that caused the intro to end after the first note. Let me know if I have! And if that is fixed, I wonder if the other camera issues will be fixed or not.