This month I’m planning to conduct Legend’s second play test ever. The testers will be my wife and kids (I’m taking baby steps). The first play test was performed by one of my sons. He discovered a game-breaking bug 30 seconds into the test. I’m hopeful that I’ll get more feedback this time around.
In preparation for the play test, I added a bunch of new content this week. I’ve historically limited content creation so that I could focus on functionality and to minimize the need to update existing content when system changes are made. However, encounter variety is a key game feature. I want to ensure that there’s enough variety for the play test sessions.
- New Map Elements
- Eight new room types were added for Catacombs sections.
- Miscellaneous Map Elements including a dead adventuring party, a gelatinous cube blocking a corridor, and a spider-infested room.
- New enemies. Wisps, Giant Floating Skulls, Unarmed Skeletons, Skeleton Warriors, Spiders.




- New items
- Copper Coins. Only Silver and Gold Coins previously existed; players were accumulating money too quickly.
- Starting equipment. I decided to add a new equipment tier, Tier 0, for starting equipment. The equipment in this tier will be only slightly better than having no weapon and armor. This makes finding Tier 1 equipment in the first few levels an upgrade and aligns with the narrative of the player being a poor, fledgling adventurer.
- Finalized weapon and armor lists. The item stats have also been determined after many hours of modeling progression and balance in spreadsheets. The stats are subject to change depending on how well they work in practice.
- Improved map room population. I was having an issue with maps being too sparse. I partially fixed this this week by increasing the number of history events by 50%. More rooms are populated now, but there’s now more repetition. Repetition is easily solved by adding more room types. Another problem to solve is disproportionate room counts between different level sections. One section may consist of a single room while others have dozens of rooms. It’s ok for one section to be larger than another, but I need to limit the degree to which section sizes can vary. Also, tying the number of history events generated in a section to the number of rooms in that section will help populate the section with the appropriate amount of content.
- Minor enhancements
- Leave the Inspect Panel open after clicking the Take All button.
- Bug fixes
- The player occasionally gets stuck when opening a door.
- Silver coins can’t be picked up.
- Bandits only drop one coin.
- When the player uses an ability that requires selecting a cell, enemies are able to attack before the cell is selected.
- Lighting doesn’t work when playing the Wizard class.
- Ranger class not animated.
- The player’s default non-weapon melee attack doesn’t work.
- Vampire no longer transforms into a bat when fleeing.
- Optimizations
- Particle effects aren’t being destroyed. Unsurprisingly, this caused severe performance degradation over time.
- Rectangle game objects used during map generation for debugging aren’t being destroyed.
Next week there will be another cycle of finding and fixing bugs and adding content.