So yesterday, after month and a half of development, I've compiled the first "playable" build and sent it to my friends for testing..

I used the quotation marks because of how quickly Arya and I realized that the build is not playable at all :D
The game loaded its unity splash screen and then jumped into the Main Menu - and that's where it ended. Sure, the Quit button worked perfectly and the About button showed us a blank page, which was yet to be done, but the New Game button did nothing at all. 

At this point I was completely stunned. I tested the whole build in the Unity preview mode several times, it should work the same no?!! It turned out, that I was wrong :D I learned that the issue was in my Scene Controller which uses the unity coroutines that behaves a bit differently in the preview mode compared to the build. Up to this point I was not aware of the magic "ctrl + B" function that let me quickly build and run the curent state of the game for testing purposes (we all learn new things at all the time), which is super useful tbh. Anyways I made sure that my coroutine was instantiated only ONCE and present at all time and the problem wanished.. But WAIT, there's more!

As usual, in any kind of development, when you fix one bug, four more appears. Suddently the debug console started to throw NullPointerExceptions here and there, the screen was not fading into black when changing the scenes, and my Save & Load level system was completely broken. So I had to, again, contact my friends to postpone their testing, and delve into to bug fixing for the rest of the day.

Today in the morning, I finished the last adjustments and added some extra final touches e.g.: an icon, asking player if they want to replace their existing savefile if starting a new game (which is highly questionable since the whole gameplay takes up about 10 minutes so far) and filled the About page (wow I really did it!) in the Main Menu which shows the controls and has some social platform hyperlinks.

"Save! Backup, build as version 0.1.2, save it into a compressed archive and backup again online and on our home server. Done!"

Now was the time for the playtesting! I recieved some good feedback mentioning the game sounds and music, its atmosphere and animations. We also found a funny bug that kinda cheats the game. When two or more Mothists (that's how I call the monsters) are trying to get to the player location and they collide wih each other, they block their ways and are stuck at the same spot. You can see it in the video here.

In this specific level was the issue that if the Mothists block your way, you're stucked! No spikes to kill yourself and restart the level and no other alternative paths. We had to go to the Main Menu and reload the save to make them unstuck.

Anyways that was it for the day. I reviewed what we have to do in our Trello Board to hit a v0.2 milestone and added some bug fixing which needs to be done next. Atleast the game is now playable, without the quotation marks ;)

-Jerry