Hey everyone, it’s Argann, and today I have the huge honor of sharing the very first Dumbino dev diary with you!
This is our chance to (more or less) regularly update you on the game’s development, and maybe throw in a few announcements along the way ~
Grab your best pair of glasses, and let’s go!
Levels
A few weeks ago, we invited you to join our very first open playtest, and we want to thank you all for participating! 💖
From the feedback we got, we realized that the single little sandbox level wasn’t enough for your brilliant domino-builder brains.
Don’t worry, we heard you! We’ve added about ten new puzzles for you to challenge your minds. Of course, more levels will be coming in the next few months!
The goal of these levels is simple: you have to knock down all the golden dominoes by creating chain reactions!
But we know you—if we let you, you’d grab the biggest domino and just knock everything over by hand (sure, that’d be fun, but probably not for more than 10 minutes).
No, the idea is for you to think up a good solution!
That’s why these puzzles happen in two phases:
- You place all the objects to set up your chain reaction
- You press “Tab” and cross your fingers that everything goes well!
We can’t wait to see your wildest solutions!
Options
From your feedback, we also saw that many of you want to tweak the game settings to get exactly the interactions you want…
Well, good news, it’s on its way! Key rebinding, adjusting hand movement sensitivity, and some display options… That’s the first batch of options already integrated!
As you can guess, this is just the beginning: now that the options system is developed, we can add more very easily! So we’re counting on you to tell us everything you’d like to be able to customize in the game!
Polish
I’d love to show you everything we’ve done these past few weeks, but a little post is way too short… 💔
But before we wrap up for today, let’s talk a bit about all those little things we’ve added, tweaked, and improved in the game, just for you 👁👄👁!
A super loading screen
Of course, if we’re adding levels and a main menu, we need a way to hide all the technical loading stuff happening in the background.
François worked hard to give us a fantastic animated loading screen, even with little tips to help you in your domino adventures!
A new action: ground pound
Wait, did you really think that pounding the ground was just an animation that we made for buttons?
Come on, we’re thinking of the little destructo-maniacs you are, of course you can smash the ground whenever and wherever you want! 💥
(Okay, we’re still figuring out the right amount of TNT to use. Explosives aren’t an exact science!)
A NEW playtest
We really love you guys, you know that! Well, I can’t speak for everyone in the studio, but I think you’re awesome.
You give us great feedback during our playtests, you support us when we show up on “Games Made In France” on MisterMV’s channel… No, really, keep it up, you’re amazing!
To reward you for all this love, I’m honored (again ~) to announce that our next playtest will start on Thursday, May 30, 2024!
Like the first one, it will run for several days, be completely free, and all we ask is that you download the game and give us as much feedback as possible about your experience. We’ll share more details then, so stay tuned 😁
And that’s the end of this first dev diary. Phew, I hope you enjoyed it. 😗
With that, I wish you a great weekend, and see you next week!