《FOLLOW THESE STEPS》玩家反馈与后续期待

The October edition of the Steam Next Fest event is just around the corner. But a few of you have played the demo already, and gave me a lot of food for thought!

First of all, big Thank You to everyone who decided to spend some time in my casual and chill puzzle game, building traffic lights and ladybugs. You giving the game a time of your day is encouraging and uplifting. Some of you also gave me a piece of your mind regarding the gameplay, and that’s the stimulus that I love to get to grease the cogs in my head.

And so, some improvements and changes are going to appear in the game that releases early next year. There is a good chance you’ll have another demo before that as well!

Better layering tools

One of the rougher parts in FOLLOW THESE STEPS, according to a few of you, is layering. It is too reliant on counting dots and it’s hard to understand relations when stacks are too far apart and you don’t have a good visual reference for their placement. To address that, I’ve already planned two changes:

Break up dots with a different symbol ever so often, making it easier to count across longer distances.
Add the new thread tool that lets you mark up the area before arranging stacks in it. The layering manual will have a step for this (optional), but you can also use it freely to leave yourself any clues and references you want!

Breaking up, not starting over

When you make a mistake stacking pieces up, the game turns very punishing. You simply cannot undo your steps, and must crush everything over the box, pieces flying everywhere, and start anew.

That is very frustrating, and though I do think there should be some challenges even in a no-stakes game (for otherwise there is no play), this is not an example of a well-thought-out hurdle. In fact, I simply haven’t given it much thought in a long time.

Now I have, and I have a solution: flicking. Just hover over a piece and flick it off the stack. If it fits the box, it will fly right to it. Better yet, flick any piece in the box too, just for fun!

Quality of life and controls

Besides bigger gameplay changes like the ones above, there are going to be smaller improvements as well.

For example, a few folks asked for a button to quickly reopen the instructions booklet. While FOLLOW THESE STEPS is all about tactility, it is designed to be played with any input method. And so it has a few hotkeys to access and trigger certain things — for your playing convenience. So a button to (re)open the steps guide is a good call!

And speaking of input methods, I know that some conveniences are missing for controllers. The game is technically playable, but not always nicely playable. I will look into improvements in that regard, with a few already on my mind.

Note, that these changes are not coming to the current demo, the one you can download below and the one participating in this Next Fest event. I could’ve made some improvements relatively quickly, but I don’t want to rush them. That’s just not how I do things, I want to implement new features properly and thoughtfully.

If you’re reading this but have not tried the demo yet, I hope you will enjoy it even with its shortcomings and frustrations. I hope that it will leave you feeling “Yeah, there is something here”, and you’ll wishlist it, and I’ll deliver something cool in a few months.

Cheers, and thanks for reading!