Eric

The current build of Virtue's Heaven and the playtests I did over the last few Months left me with a long list of things I wanted to improve/optimize, one which being the general room/level layout (not as much the map as a whole, because that would eat too much time and erase too much progress).

Basically my goal is to have more rooms that are build in such a way that it's possible to get through them with a chain of specific movement inputs, while also leaving enough space for players to get through them in a nice fashion, should they fail to execute said chain properly.

Honestly, I think one of the potentially cool aspects of backtracking is that it gives you a chance to get past a previous challenge, but with a bit more knowledge about the game. So building areas in such a way that players after they've been through it once or twice, can go "Let's try something else" and have an interesting result would be neat, but it's also hard to do.

It's been way over six years since I started working on what would eventually become Virtue's Heaven. The game went through many iterations, but throughout its cursed development there was one thing that stayed the same:

Movement should be expressive and exciting.

It was born out of a deep appreciation for maximalist mid-1990s action platformers and the frustrations I had with Metroidvania games and their insistence to lock cool movement abilities behind hours of needless progression.

I wanted a game, where you could explore a larger, connected space, without requiring players to collect several wardrobes full of movement upgrades in order to for the game to feel cool to play. And so, I created the most maximalist movement system I could think of.

Hello again Friends!

Work on Virtue’s Heaven continues at pace, which still feels weird to say, but nonetheless it’s true. Anyway, I’m in the process of finishing the first version of what I hope will be the game’s intro/tutorial section and thought it might be a good idea to see if some people here are interested in helping me playtest that section. I’ve already had a lot of people who thankfully gave their time to test an earlier version of the game, but that one didn't have a Tutorial, and now a good amount of them have learned how to play the game the hard (and slightly broken) way.

You can sign up via this form! Also there's no need to sign up again, should you've already signed up to be a playtester. I'm just trying to find some more people who have not yet played the game.

I aim to have everything ready by the end of next week. After that I need to take some time to update that game’s steam page, since it’s very out of date.

Spend my morning getting distracted by fiddling around with Virtue's Heaven's jumping physics. Well, actually it was the visual side of the jumping and not the actual numbers, but it was really interesting to see how much changing the visual representation of a jump can change the way it feels to a player.