Dev Log: Surprises From the Turning Manor Demo Release

For our first dev log we wanted to go into more detail of what went into our first patch for the demo and how even with best efforts developers have to be ready for the unexpected. Two big surprises for us was finding issues that somehow did not come up in our hundreds of hours of internal testing and external playtests. 

The first showed up the last place a developer wants to see an issue pop up: in a let’s play video. Shout out to youtuber Spazious who discovered you could get trapped in endless darkness after running into Writer’s Block. Reviewing his video helped us discover that looking into the room’s peephole before the exit shows up made the exit load backwards so the player would exit and fall into the abyss. Somehow no one else had done in this in any of our testing!

The second surprise was an issue we found while testing our fixes for the Patch before releasing it: the counter didn’t appear on the conveyor belt level. This was confusing to find as we had not modified anything in the level. Looking into the issue we discovered something hilarious: the conveyor belt also moved the trigger volume that equip the counter. Not only that but it apparently had _always_ moved the trigger volume. The issue never showed up because in all our testing everyone sprinted into the hallway and hit the volume before it moved.

It’s impossible for us to catch everything, so big thank you to our players who let us know about any issues they ran into! We’re glad that people are enjoying the demo so far.

The patch also include minor fixes and improvements to the game, listed in more detail in our patch notes here.