Welcome to the Polished Beta!

NEW IN THIS BUILD:

New levels! There are two new levels for you to explore! Level 3 is currently in beta but it is playable!

Revamped painting mechanic! The painting you make now stays! how beautiful. 

New Shapes! The revamp to the painting system brought with it a whole new arsenal of shapes as well as getting rid of some older clunkier ones. 

A new title! Project Glow is now officially named "A Thousand Words." 

A brand new trailer for the game! Enjoy!

Not much had to change in this build, there were very few bugs, and the feedback was mostly positive. Given this we did our best to improve upon the beta, adding our two new, deeply involved levels. Level 3 is currently still in development and will have a much more interesting element in the future. 

BUG FIXES:

Fixed a bug with shape recognition, some of the rotations in the calculations were incorrect, causing shape recognition to be unstable. This bug was present since the first iteration and was the reason behind the shapes seeming to have a mind of their own sometimes. Fixing this issue has made the game much more satisfying. 

Remedied game crashing bug where if the last kill was a double kill the index for world building would be out of range and the game would end. 

Fixed LIV support for mixed reality footage capture. 

PLAYTESTING:

Feedback this week was very helpful in terms of polishing the beta. We got to see reactions to our new enemy type and received a lot of feedback about difficulty of the game and ways to balance it!

In general the projectile ink blob received a lot of love. Players were ducking and diving to get away from its vicious inky pellets. Players reported they felt much more engaged in the game and that it was overall much more fun and interesting. They suggested some fixes to spawn rate and rate of fire which we took into consideration and altered accordingly. 

Some of the feedback we had received in previous weeks led into what we wanted to accomplish this week. Painting was difficult and not always fair to the player. We fixed this by catching a nasty bug in our code (our bad!). 

Players also felt somewhat disappointed when their beautiful drawings got replaced with our crude templates. So we made theirs stick around! Now the player can watch exactly what they painted hang around and beautifully fade out. 

The Studio room was found to be too noisy for comfort, so we went back to a simpler, plainer old studio room to make the player feel more comfortable. 

FUTURE PLANS:

There's a lot in the works for the devs at Elker Studios. Look out next week for a completed build of the game! There may be some exciting new characters in the world as well ;) both helpful and very very not. We also have plans to update some assets, the paintbrush looks a bit too much like wood (don't look too closely) and there are some things that need to be cleaned up to add to the immersion. There's also plans to add new music (thank the dev gods am I right?), we've been coordinating with a freelance artist and plan to have a beautiful new score to complement the beauty of our world. 

Have fun and make love to that canvas painters!

-Elker Studios