How Early Feedback can Change the Trajectory of Your Game

This week was a crucial one. In terms of getting functionalities done, we didn't make much progress, but we had some industry professionals test our game prototypes and give us feedback. We have been in production for a little over a month now and thanks to this feedback we now have a more precise vision of what we want to accomplish at the end of production. During the playtest there were two topics that kept being focused on, one being the combat system and the other being multiplayer. Most of their concern was how is the combat gonna change when playing in single-player and multiplayer.

When I was first asked this question I was stumped because up until now multiplayer was just gonna be a way to just play with your friend and explore the dungeons nothing much would change. But if combat was many focused on one-on-one and not team combat could get stale and boring quickly. The solution that we came up with was to add a status effect system to the weapons. The main three effects will be fire, ice, and earth. The main to aspects of the combat that would change will be the stagger of the enemy and the abilities, for stagger an enemy using a fire sword the enemies will catch flame and take damage to each tick, ice will slow down enemies, and earth will completely stop the enemies and make them fall. There will also be a team combo where if I stagger an enemy with my fire weapon if my teammate with an ice weapon hits him with his second ability that hit will do 2x damage to the enemy. Now we have a good idea of what the combat loop will look like and all that we have to figure out is how we can challenge the player using combat puzzles