A prolific master of feedback, aka Guert from the TIGSOURCE forums, grinded my upcoming turn-based shoot-em-up called Roach Toaster 2.

What is a grind? A Grind is an in-depth (often brutal) feedback to a game, hence the name “grind”. To me there is not a thing like “brutal” feedback. Any feedback with a decent backing is great feedback.

Read the Roach Toaster 2 Grind.

He confirmed what I was worried about Roach Toaster 2 all along. It didn’t quite have enough motivation to keep going. I could add more gameplay elements, but this will just add more balancing and testing (something which I despise, considering I am a lone developer with a small (3) fanbase). Something that was missing from RT2 was the personal involvement (which Guert also mentioned).

Roach Toaster 1 followed a story, albeit not very deep, but gameplay elements were a part of the story. Units were introduced to things happening in the story. In Roach Toaster 2 (before the grind), it was all concise and analytical. New units were blandly introduced after you beat a few levels. The game revolved more on the short-term gameplay. While Roach Toaster (1+2) has great short-term gameplay, it isn’t enough to carry the game without more elements.

Thus, I have decided to scrap “Big City” and start over with a new proper story-like campaign. The old levels will still be used as bonus levels (lol 45 bonus levels, yippee!).

The teams/enhancements have been scrapped earlier. Now that “Big City” is also being scrapped, I am losing about 2 months of dev time.

Although this might be a bad thing to some, I like to see Roach Toaster 2 grow with each iteration and prototype.

P.S. In the vain of Frayed Knights “dev” diary, I am starting a weekly devblog of Roach Toaster 2, starting tomorrow.