After a month of intense development, we finally conducted Gotogra’s first closed playtest with a small group of fresh players. First off, apologies for the lack of new devlogs—preparing this build took our full attention. The playtest group was around ten people from our personal circle, ranging from avid gamers to folks who rarely play games. This mix was intentional: we wanted to see how easily even non-gamers could pick up Gotogra’s basics, and how seasoned players would engage with its deeper systems.
Overall, the session was incredibly insightful. Below, we break down what clicked, what caused confusion, and how we plan to refine the game moving forward.
Core Mechanics & Learning Curve
One encouraging result was that almost every tester quickly grasped Gotogra’s core mechanics. They understood how to move the character on the platforms and how to spend resources to move or play cards without much trouble. This suggests our tutorials and UI for basic actions are on the right track, making the game accessible even to those with limited gaming experience.
However, we did notice a common stumbling block: understanding enemy behaviors and abilities. Several testers weren’t sure what each enemy type did at first glance. Our current tooltips or visual cues for enemy intent might not be clear enough for newcomers. We plan to polish this aspect with cleaner explanations or visual indicators so players can better anticipate what an enemy will do.
That said, it’s not necessarily a bad thing if everything isn’t understood immediately. Gotogra is a roguelike, and part of the fun in roguelike games comes from discovery and learning through failure. It’s okay (and often rewarding) for players to be challenged on their first run, fail, then come back armed with new knowledge. Iterating through runs and gradually uncovering what enemies do can provide that satisfying “aha!” moment and a dopamine boost when you finally overcome a challenge. Our goal is to find the right balance—make enemy intents clearer without completely hand-holding the player or spoiling the surprise of learning through experience.
User Experience: Balancing Clarity and Friction
In terms of user experience (UX), we received one notable piece of critical feedback. A tester identified a couple of pain points in how players interact with cards and the game board:
- Accidental Card Plays: Right now, playing a card is as simple as clicking it. One tester found this too easy to mis-trigger; a quick accidental click could play a card they didn’t intend to use, potentially wasting a resource or cooldown. They suggested adding a confirmation step (like “Are you sure?” or a drag-and-drop mechanism) to prevent unintended card plays.
- Facing Direction & Targeting: Gotogra’s card effects depend on the direction your character is facing (since many attacks or skills target platforms in front of you). This tester sometimes lost track of the hero’s facing and played a card, only to have it affect the wrong direction or miss the intended target. The feedback was that the game could do more to remind or show players which way their character is oriented before they commit to an action.
Both of these issues boil down to clarity in the UI and minimizing frustration. We’ve already implemented a system that highlights the affected platforms when you hover over a card, giving a preview of where an action will land. Clearly, this indicator might not be prominent enough. To address the directionality issue, we’re considering ways to better emphasize the hero’s facing—perhaps an arrow icon on the base of the character or more pronounced highlights on the enemies that would be impacted by the card effect. We want players to think tactically, but we don’t want the interface to trick them into mistakes that feel unfair.
The idea of a confirmation dialog for card plays, however, led to a lot of internal debate. On one hand, a safety check could prevent misclicks. On the other, it introduces what we call “bad friction”—an extra step that slows the game’s pace and potentially annoys the player. Gotogra’s combat is meant to be snappy and tactical; repeatedly confirming every card use could make it feel sluggish. We ultimately lean towards avoiding a confirm button for each action, and instead focus on improving visual feedback so that players rarely misclick in the first place. Good game design is about finding the fun kind of friction (the kind that makes you strategize) and eliminating the unwarranted friction (the kind that makes the controls cumbersome).
It’s worth noting that none of the other testers reported the above issues. Most found the click-to-play system intuitive and fast, which is exactly the experience we intended. This highlights how subjective UX can be—what bothers one player might not faze another. Still, the feedback is valuable. Our plan is to enhance clarity (through better highlights, indicators, or maybe an option in settings for those who want confirmations) rather than immediately add universal confirmation prompts. We believe this approach will keep Gotogra feeling smooth and responsive while addressing the potential for error.
Early Mastery & Emergent Strategies
Interestingly, a couple of playtesters demonstrated exceptional skill right off the bat. Despite never having played Gotogra before, they picked up its nuances almost immediately and even started exploiting advanced tactics. For example, one tester quickly grasped an important deckbuilding strategy: he realized that keeping his deck lean (by skipping some card rewards) led to drawing his most powerful cards more often. In essence, he figured out the optimal number of cards for efficient deck cycling and was intentionally skipping new cards to maintain that flow.
Seeing this kind of emergent strategy was thrilling for us. It shows that Gotogra’s mechanics have a depth that savvy players can engage with. A core design goal for us is to reward knowledge and strategy—if you understand the system well, you can make clever decisions to get an edge. The fact that a first-time player discovered a pro strategy (deck size management) on his own is a positive signal that our game systems are intuitive enough to learn, yet deep enough to master.
Of course, this also gives us food for thought on tuning difficulty. If some players can optimize and breeze through early content, we need to ensure the game’s challenge scales up to match them in later levels. Roguelikes thrive on being accessible to play but difficult to win. We’ll keep an eye on how deck size strategies and other tactics affect game balance as more people play, and adjust enemy scaling or card offerings if needed to maintain a satisfying challenge for both newcomers and experts.
Audio and SFX Impressions
Another highlight from the playtest was the audio feedback. Testers overwhelmingly praised the music and sound effects in Gotogra. The background music was described as “engaging, but never annoying,” which is exactly what we hoped for in a game meant to be replayed many times. You want a soundtrack that can pump you up and immerse you in the atmosphere without grating on you after the hundredth loop. It sounds like we’re on the right track there.
Our sound effects, though currently limited in number, also received positive remarks. Players found them punchy and satisfying, enhancing the impact of actions. Even small audio cues (like the swoosh of a card or the thud of a successful hit) contribute a lot to the tactile feel of the game. We’re glad that the early audio design is resonating well, and we’ll continue to invest in sound design as development progresses. After all, in a tactical game, clarity isn’t just visual—audio cues help players understand what’s happening, and feeling the power of an ability through sound can make it that much more rewarding.
Bugs, Glitches & Ongoing Fixes
No playtest would be complete without uncovering some bugs and glitches, and our session was no exception. Testers ran into a few issues, ranging from cards not working exactly as intended to odd behavior in edge-case scenarios. In one run, for instance, a combination of status effects on an enemy caused a bizarre sequence of events that we hadn’t seen before (and definitely didn’t intend!). These situations, while a bit embarrassing in the moment, are incredibly useful to witness. Every bug is an opportunity to improve the game’s robustness.
During the playtest, we came prepared with a cheat/debug system to smooth over any game-breaking issues. This toolkit let us do things like reset a level, fix a character’s state, or even manually remove a troublesome enemy, all on the fly. It proved invaluable—when a bug threatened to halt progress, we used cheats to keep the session going so the testers could experience as much content as possible. It’s a reminder that when testing an in-development game, a little behind-the-scenes wizardry can keep the feedback flowing.
Following the playtest, we’ve been hard at work fixing the reported bugs. Our priority is to resolve the critical gameplay issues first (like cards not triggering correctly), then polish the smaller glitches. It’s an ongoing effort, but we’re knocking out bugs one by one. The game is much more stable now than it was before the test, and that’s thanks to the problems our playtesters helped us identify.
Preparing for the Demo Release
All in all, we’re very happy with how this first playtest went. It’s reassuring to see that the core gameplay is fun and comprehensible, and the feedback has shown us exactly where to focus our improvements. The playtest struck a nice balance: it highlighted some strengths to build on (accessible mechanics, strategic depth, strong audio) and pointed out the weak spots we need to address (enemy clarity, certain UX quirks, and of course, bugs).
Our next big milestone is to package a public demo build. Now that we’ve incorporated a lot of the initial feedback, we’re aiming to release a demo on itch.io in the near future. This will let a broader audience try out Gotogra and will surely bring in a new wave of impressions and data for us to chew on. If all goes well on itch.io, the plan is to follow up with a Steam demo as well, reaching even more players.
Stay tuned for news on the demo’s release date. We’re incredibly excited (and a bit nervous!) to get Gotogra into more hands soon. In the meantime, we’ll continue refining the game, adding a bit more polish with every iteration.
Thanks for reading and following along with our development journey. Your interest and support mean a lot to us. We hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at our playtest process and findings. Until next time, happy gaming—and we can’t wait to share more updates with you as Gotogra evolves!
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