I’m not sure we can technically say that we hit beta on time. Sound was around 50% in the game, and art was closer to 20%. This is pretty far from the 75% that we were supposed to hit. There definitely were some things that we could’ve done to prioritize that sort of thing, but to be fair our game has a tremendous amount of content in it. That does mean we should have accounted for it, but I still think that if we maintain our current pace we should be fine.

There was an art pipeline issue that needed to be resolved weeks ago and only came up this week. It’s not anyone’s fault, as nobody involved took initiative until now, but the Florida level blocks that we had didn’t quite fit into the editor tool, and at this point we’re just needing to go back and put all of it in manually. It doesn’t take a tremendous amount of time to do, but it’s a little frustrating as the level design tool was made specifically so this sort of thing wouldn’t need to happen.

Running Florida through QA proved that the overall structure of it is working well, but it was also extremely buggy. I think I’ve got a clear handle on what I need to fix. There were some obvious things, like exits and rooms that just straight up didn’t work, but I’ll also be playing with some enemy configurations to make sure that the difficulty is balanced correctly. Again, putting the art in for the enemies is going to help tremendously for feedback, and I’m excited to see what players think of Florida once it really looks like Florida.

We made the final list of frogs! They’ve all got functions and personalities. I had a lot of fun brainstorming with Luke about what each of them could do and why their personality connected to their in game function. One of my favorites was Chucky, a terrified frog with dorky glasses, who gives the player increased knockback and speed, and decreased damage, the idea being that he helps the player run away from enemies. Integrating fun narrative stuff into game mechanics is honestly one of my favorite parts of game design.