Lessons Learned

Oh, hi!

You’ve caught us in the middle of work as we are currently neck-deep in elbow grease, viscera, and God only knows what other fluids to release the perfect game.

But, since it’s you, I guess we can make a little time for a devblog.

The road ahead is long but exciting.

When we started scoping out Walk of Life, we began by looking back to its predecessor and the lessons we learned from it (if any).

Over the years since its release, the No Time to Relax community has provided us with a bunch of feedback through reviews, emails, and the in-game feedback button, with comments ranging from heartfelt praise to all-caps vitriol about us and our mothers.

No Time to Relax was well received, maintaining a "Very Positive" user review score on Steam—for a brief and beautiful period even reaching the coveted "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating.

The Hex Shop was added to increase player interaction.

So, these are all strong points of No Time to Relax that we must keep in mind not to lose when developing Walk of Life. Now let’s dive into the negative feedback.

A highly requested feature we couldn’t deliver was more content. Players wanted more of the world they inhabited in the game. Why can’t I visit the hospital or work at the harbour even though I see it? Unfortunately, adding more content to the game was tricky because the game’s code was hastily assembled in only six months and had a tendency to unravel when fiddled with.

Player interaction or lack thereof was another complaint that we did deliver on with the hex shop, although some players thought the system could have benefitted from more depth.

No Time to Relax? Solved it.

The most common complaint was that the game’s optimal strategy was relatively easy to figure out after a few playthroughs. Even if they initially liked the No Time to Relax, many players felt the game became repetitive after it had been “solved”.

All of this feedback is immensely useful to us and we think we’ve come up with a system that will go a long way with tackling the replayability issue: quests

What are roles, you ask? Well, you can probably guess, but we’ll tell you more about them in our next devblog. Until then, enjoy this sneak preview of someone you might encounter in Walk of Life.

A treasure worth its weight in… something.