Timeline:

• March 19th: Beta build demo
• March 22nd: Playtest report submitted
• March 27th: Zynga field trip

Synopsis:

The Beta build of the game included continuations of the work we had been doing. Here’s a summary of the main points. For even more detail on what the Beta build included as well the process of getting to it, see the playtesting report linked on this devlog.

• Intro cutscene to introduce Jules and Wish - consists of twelve hand-drawn and animated mini-scenes depicting Jules rediscovering their notebook, being compelled to revisit the RTR facility, and travelling to it.
• The beginnings of narrative flavour pieces - demonstration was an apology letter that Jules was forced to write to one of the administrators.
• A new lighting system that heavily added to the atmosphere, though we did find this new addition lagged out the game, something we plan to optimize for in the future.
• Added lots of details for immersion and cohesion of style - making most things hand-drawn/handwritten where possible, adding a typewriter effect to text to imply Jules's thinking as they examine their surroundings, as well as continuing to texture the environment. Tweaked the content of the text to reflect this as well.
• Mouse sensitivity slider in the pause menu to accommodate for preferences and equipment. 

Moving forwards, while we do not anticipate adding more acts, we are going to change the tutorial area to be a more fleshed-out foyer/entryway area (almost like a mini act 0), and add content to explore in the act 1 area even after the puzzle has been completed. This will also change our tutorialization process, which we’ve planned to do anyway based on player feedback. Additionally, we plan to add a setting to switch between the fancier lighting system and the old one, so higher-performance computers could run the fancier system. We still plan to optimize so hopefully it’d run even on lower-performance machines, but this setting is a good backup.

Note - only a Mac build of the Beta build is available, as we were using our own laptops to demo it. 

For the field trip to Zynga, we made another demo with some of the above mentioned changes.