April Progress Report -- Game Show Feedback

Hi folks! I wanted to give you all another update on the progress of the next incoming build, it is still coming along. I got slowed down a bit last week as I got sick for a few days then fell behind on work and life. Just as I got better I also demo'ed MetalMercs at the 2024 ROC Game Fest Spring Mini Show. This was a great experience but did take more of my time to prepare than I'd anticipated. Suffice to say I'm probably still about 2 weeks away from the next playable version coming out. When I can see the light at the end of the tunnel I will schedule a Live Stream as I usually do to show off the new features and get your initial impressions. So keep an eye out for that!

Regarding the game show, it was a great experience. My naivety will show here but I went into the show thinking it would just be an easy way to expose MetalMercs to some people who may have never heard of it before. And it was good for that, for sure. However, another element that I should've thought more about is that it was a great way to get some testing feedback on the game. Seeing dozens of people who'd never heard of MetalMercs sit down and try to play it for the first time really opened my eyes to some things we could be doing better, to make the initial impressions and learning the controls a lot better. So I've shifted a bit more attention to trying to shore up the tutorial a bit more and that will likely get folded into the next build that's coming as well. It won't slow me down significantly, but I wanted to update the demo with this new build and so I think improving the opening experience is important to include as well.

Anyway, the show was a lot of fun overall and I definitely will try to do other small shows like this in future. The big ones still intimidate me for now, but who knows. No guts, no glory, right?