The first playtest of Legend of the Ultimate Dragon wrapped up yesterday. Most of the testers sent a report.
Last time I wrote about the messages: the crackle my laptop speakers hid, and the rules the game knows and never says. Messages tell you how somebody felt. The reports tell you what they did. Every report comes with a record of the tester's month: every fight, every trip, every conversation, every coin. I've been reading them like diaries, and one of them turned two problems I thought I had into one.
In the first half of their month, one tester lost nearly half their fights. They stayed at Level 1 for days with more than enough experience to level, because they hadn't found out that you level by beating your Master at the Training Hall. Most days they went into the woods once or twice, got hurt, and stopped. They told me the fighting felt weak.
Then they found the Master. They learned to spend the resource their class builds instead of sitting on it. And the record changes completely. In the second half of the month they died once in close to a hundred fights, and beat fighters in the Arena two levels above them. They told me the fights felt a little easy, and asked for tougher creatures as they leveled.
If I'd only had the messages, I'd have seen two balance problems pointing in opposite directions: too hard in week one, too easy in week two. The record shows something else. It's the same game, the same creatures, and the same player. The only thing that changed was what they knew.
So I'm not touching the balance yet. Tuning the numbers for a player who doesn't know the rules would make the game wrong for everyone who does. The game has to teach its rules first. Then I can find out how hard it really is.
The second thing in that record stung a little.
That tester finished the whole month in under three hours, about five minutes a day. They fought, trained, went to the Arena and went to bed. Out of everything the town has to say, they heard a small part. Several of the people who matter most, they never met. They never set foot in the Chapel. And they rated the game ten out of ten for anyone who enjoys the old BBS games.
I sat with that for a while. The old door games were played exactly like that. You logged in, took your fights and logged off, and plenty of people never read a word they didn't have to. That's a fair way to play, and the game has to hold up for it, which it did. But the town's story shouldn't depend on a player deciding to go looking for it. Right now, if you came for the fights, nothing pulls you into the Tavern or the Chapel. That's mine to fix.
Last week, the town started talking about the creatures. Every creature in the woods has a folk name, the kind of name people give a thing they'd rather not look at too long. Until now, nobody in town ever said one. You read the name for the first time on the fight screen, like a label. Now you overhear it in the Square, the one place every player walks through every day. A woman calls her boy in from the fences because Grey-Eye's out there. The boy says Grey-Eye only looks. He says it like he's seen it.
It's a small thing. But it's the kind of fix these reports point to: put the story where the player already is, instead of hoping they wander in to find it.
The other reports said the same thing in their own ways. One tester stopped on the first day. The enemies weren't the problem; nothing told them how to get stronger, and figuring it out alone took longer than their patience. Another lost their first three days to not knowing how their class was meant to fight. Once they worked it out, they played for nine hours and loved it. On a low-end laptop, too, and it ran smoothly the whole way. Three players, the same wall.
None of this changed during the playtest. Everyone in this wave played the same game, so their reports could be compared. The decisions came from all of them together, not from one player, and teaching came first. That work has started. There's now a How to Play page on the title screen, and your Master will tell you about each ability as you earn it. When an ability is ready to use, the fight tells you in gold-colored text. The next wave will play the result.
Everyone who sent a report is now a Founding Playtester, and their name goes in the game's credits, the way they want to be credited. Thank you, all of you. You found things I couldn't have found in another year of playing it myself.
If you'd like a key for the next wave, leave a comment on the game's itch.io page, or find me on Bluesky at @realmcreationstudios.com or on Reddit as NathanRCS, and I'll put your name on the list. I can't take everyone, but I'll answer everyone.
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