#3 Devlog: Last days before releasing “Flight Assist Off Race”

The Release Countdown

The game will be released on the

6th of June,

accompanied by a trailer. Until then, I’ll post a short behind-the-scenes devlog entry each day, going into details about the level design, racing ships, and more.

Slipping the Deadline aka More Good Stuff!

The plan was to release on itch.io within May 2024 - which, according to the date this is being posted, you can see didn’t fully work out. The reason for this is mostly that I decided to move some features that I planned for post-release into the 1.0 version:

The decision for this happened due to testers’ feedback which varied a lot:

• “This is incredibly hard. I was barely able to finish the welcome level.”
• “Too short. Was done with everything within a matter of minutes and the ship is too slow to have fun.”

The following realization was a big surprise for me! Either the controls and the gravity-free movement style are very familiar to players who already know it from games like Asteroids, or not at all. And when it’s not familiar, it’s actually really hard to grasp since it doesn’t compare to many common games. Seeing players not being able to turn and stop the ship even after several attempts made me realize the first levels would have to be way more forgiving; otherwise, the survival duration would be around 2 seconds per attempt, which would be immensely frustrating. Ironically, the wider levels, which I designed for high speeds - so more advanced from my point of view - were received quite well by testers.

So I added three very short but largely spaced levels, slowly introducing the player into the racing world.

Beyond that, I noticed that a few words of explanation here and there led to some ‘aha-effect’ that showed immediate positive results in managing the controls. For that reason, I introduced a bit of a tutorial and “Commander Vivi” who gives a few tips here and there.

But more about that in a separate devlog, and until then,

Fly fast o7