Hello all!

Over the past week, I have conducted a playtest of most recent, in-development Jumper game. This post is dedicated to reflecting on the results, and events.

For quite a long while now, I've felt as the game had lost it's direction, or at least has severely derailed from it. On the 12th of December, a friend of mine reminded me of this project, and I took to David Social, to ask the people if they would be interested in playtesting my game on the weekend taking place after. Quite a few people actually replied yes! 

On December 14th, I have published the current, in-development Jumper & Apple game, in it's current unfinished, as-is state, without any modifications to account for the playtest. I packaged up the executable, it's components, and a readme file, and let it out in the open. Last minute, I included a google forms link into the readme file's bottom, which was meant to aggregate all the replies into one place. It got a whopping 0 answers! Truth be told, since it's last minute implementation, and lack of mention anywhere besides deep inside the readme file, I do not blame anyone for not finding it. However, back over on David Social I got quite a lot of replies though compared to what I was expecting. - and a few ratings here on itch.io.

I only got mostly positive feedback, which was a bit surprising because I also asked people to be more critical. No specific issues were mentioned, other than what I was already mostly aware of. How reliable is this of source of feedback? Well I'd say that my sample size was still a bit small, and that certainly impacted it, not to mention the bias that may arise from (mostly) users of David Social rating a game made by a person who is also a member of David Social. The downloads of the game also spiked up in this period, according to analytics partially due to David Social, but interestingly enough, Itch.io's analytics did not cite as David Social as the majority of incoming views and downloads. The non-play-test, Jumper Series, which is a package containing all previous entries in the series, which is currently available here, until I finally get around to giving them all their own specific page, also saw a spike in downloads despite the playtest not being aimed at it - likely due to some algorithm recommending it more for some reason, perhaps the devlog announcement, therefore I chose to disable them for the time being, in hopes of pushing people towards the playtest instead.

From this, the conclusion that I can draw, is to continue this project, in it's current form, without completely overhauling everything, and that I should rather fix it, and expand upon it rather than starting another new, ambitious project aimed at fixing the flaws that occurred during the development of this one. Things will likely continue to change about the game, however now I'd like to believe that the basis is good, and fun - it just needs to be polished further.

I've re-enabled downloads for the original Jumper series, but also kept the playtest build up for the time being. It will be probably removed by next week however.

If you participated in play-testing, and have provided any feedback, I thank you for helping in the creation of this game, it truly means a lot to me!

Since then, I have started work on the game again, I am trying to address the issues that plague the game in it's current form. Proper save system, support for resolutions others than 16:9, and many more. Hopefully, I'll be able to get work done. If you read trough all this, thank you for your time, and have a nice day!