Kandria
Some Playtesting Results
Last week we completed our first full game playtest sessions. An exciting time! There's still a lot of rough patches in the visuals, but otherwise the full game is playable. Some of the later dialogue even I hadn't seen yet, since I'd been so busy with everything else, and I gotta say, it's pretty darn good!
We haven't yet made our way through all the side quests, but we can at least give you some rough figures for the play time of a main-story-only playthrough. Tim played with the intention of imitating a normal player, someone not too familiar with the platforming controls. It took him about 6-7 hours to get through the main story, doing as little sidequest stuff as possible.
In contrast, I played with the intention of playing someone that's very well versed with the platforming controls and is trying to get through the game quick, again with zero side quests. It took me about 2 hours, still. I'm sure I can cut that time down if I tried a genuine speedrun, but I want to talk about speedrunning specifically some other time.
This rough figure is pretty good in my eyes, though. Especially with the sidequests stacked on top, I would guess an average Any% playthrough would land somewhere in the 6-10 hours, and a 100% playthrough perhaps in the 10-14 hours. There's a lot of secrets to find, which I'm sure would tack on a lot of extra time.
The playtests also gave us a bunch of extra feedback items we need to tackle, and I'm sure we'll get a lot more once we get the game in front of testers that aren't us. Speaking of that, if you've backed the Courier ($150) or higher tier, you should have already received a Steam code with which you can play through current versions, and if you've also joined the Discord you should have received a role that gives you access to the beta testers channel.
For anyone that backed the Hunter ($40) or higher tier, you'll receive your codes soon enough. The game is still in a bit too rough of a state for Beta, but we should hit a good point by the end of August or early September the latest.
Anyway, if the playthrough timings we're projecting right now stick, I'll be very happy. I consider 6-12 hours for an action RPG of our kind to be a really good, if not ideal length, and I'm looking forward to what we can learn from further playtests!