Frayed Knights Development Update

In his latest development update on Frayed Knights, Rampant Games’ Jay Barnson talks about the title’s ongoing beta testing, and how he’s planning to change the game based on the feedback received during it. Sample ahead:

Brian (Skavenhorde) Critser managed to be the first player to finish the full game without needed (or even possessing) developer codes and cheat menus. He proved it could be done, and also demonstrated that I’d spent so much time trying to make the first part of the game not *too* tough that I neglected to balance the latter half of the game very well. I had (boss) enemies that were weaker than rank-and-file enemies in the same area, and high-level magic-using threats that were actually quite low-level and severely lacking in magic. And by (severely lacking) I mean I forgot to give them spells to use. But they died so fast that Brian hadn’t actually noticed.

Oops.

There are a couple of quests that have confused players and have caused extra backtracking and hunting for something that might have been missed. While that theoretically extends play-time, that’s not fun gameplay, so I’m trying to fix those. I’ve taken those as work items, adding additional hints in conversations, journal pages, or environmental clues to make sure other players don’t find themselves getting too lost. I love throwing adventure-game style puzzles into the game, but I don’t want them to be too difficult. One interesting tidbit is that DGM (my other epic-tester) found the minotaur maze to be frustrating, whereas Skavenhorde (who maybe is used to being run through a maze, I dunno.) thought it was pretty easy and not very maze-like. (Neither of them were playing with auto-maps, since those haven’t worked since the pilot. I know, they are on my (to do) list.)