The past two weeks have been spent trying to balance one week of vacation while also iterating on the demo based on feedback. I'm now extremely proud of what I've got going. Testers seem to love it and it's just in a good place.
I made a devlog that shows the progress of the demo as well, people have said it's my best devlog yet!
Intro/Outro
One big thing I added was some sort of intro and then an outro, in order to have a better presentation of what you should do. At the start of the demo you are presented with a small dialog that tells you the overall goal with the demo, grab all eggs.
Then later in the level you'll find a "real" frog that tells you that once you've grabbed all three eggs he can take you to the next area. It's not breaking any new grounds but it's at least some framing for the demo.
Improved Animation
During the playtests a good friend of mine said that I missed opportunities where I could show the good friendship between the characters and the connection between the player and characters. The old animation wasn't very reliable, the character didn't always look into the camera which could cause scenarios where you looked at the back of the character. So I tried to improve it by making a new animation and also animating the camera in the same animation. At the start of the cutscene the script will find the "CameraCutscenePoint" in the player rig and then follow that. This took a little back and forth to get good but for a quicker test I think it turned out well.
Added Content
I almost forgot that I added new content since the last devlog. I decided to expand the open area and add new characters there. So I've now added a small jump puzzle, some enemies and NPCs and finally some small platforming leading up to the egg. This flow works great because after grabbing the egg you can use the glider to get back to the start of the open area.
Polish, Polish and more Polish
Once all of the "bigger" tasks were done I sat down, played through the demo over and over. Found small stuff that you always forget and with the feedback from watching testers play I knew quick fixes I had to add. There are these buttons on the ground that you can performa a ground pound on in order to start a path of red orbs that you need to collect within a time limit. Once people started it they didn't quite know where to run so I added a paper circle around it with the pointy side towards the first orb, this seems to help which is a great thing! One tester also found that after you've helped the scarecrow you get a yellow orb.. but if you talk with him again you'll get another one, and another one and so on... This is now also fixed haha.
Also the evening before a deadline the animations all stopped working even though it all looked normal in Unity... I fixed it later by importing the player again.
Thanks for reading about my updates! Don't forget to wishlist it as well if you like what you see!
