In this playtest feedback meeting, we first looked through the feedback spreadsheet and started to re-evaluate the current scope of the project. Although the meeting initially started from Alex’s feedback about “placeholder text”, the discussion quickly moved towards a more important question: what we could still realistically complete at the current stage of production, and what had to be cut.

At that point, the team had already realised that it was no longer realistic to continue pushing every design idea from the GDD. The combat system, especially, had become very difficult to complete with the remaining time, technical capacity, and team resources. Instead of continuing to expand large features, it made more sense to first make sure that Chapter One could run stably, and that players could smoothly understand and experience the core content of the current Vertical Slice.

Because of this, the team started to evaluate the priority of the playtest feedback one by one. Issues such as map clipping, players falling out of the map, and players walking through fences were treated as critical bugs, because they directly broke the player experience and interrupted the game flow. Compared with new features or lower-priority polish tasks, these problems had to be fixed first. The team decided to address them by adding invisible walls, colliders, and boundary limits.

The meeting also discussed whether we should add a sprint function. Although sprint is a common movement feature in many games, the team eventually decided not to include it. The reason was that the current project was closer to slow-paced exploration and NPC interaction, rather than fast movement or action gameplay. Adding sprint would not only change the pacing of the map, but also create extra testing costs. It could even make the already small map feel even shorter. Because of this, sprint was treated as a new feature that did not really fit the core experience of the current Vertical Slice.

The mini-map feature was also rejected. The current map was not very large, and players could mostly understand the spatial layout through the visuals and environment. Adding a mini-map for such a small scene would create extra UI, programming, and art workload, but would only bring limited improvement to the showcase build. This discussion made me realise that playtest feedback does not mean everything should be implemented. The team still needs to judge which feedback is actually worth moving into production based on the project goal, development cost, and remaining time.

For art and UI details, the team also filtered priorities carefully. For example, the item count display was unclear because the UI icon overlapped with the number. This affected how players read information, so it needed to be fixed quickly. However, some more detailed icon polish or extra art refinements were temporarily moved to a lower priority. This did not mean that polish was unimportant. It was more because, at that stage, the project needed to solve stability, readability, and core playability first.

For the development plan, the team formed a compromise. Kevin and I would continue focusing on improving the first level, fixing bugs, adding necessary content, and strengthening the core experience. After finishing the current optimisation tasks, playboi cope could start building the second level forest and cabin scene. This allowed us to make sure that the first level, as the main showcase area of the Vertical Slice, would be properly polished, while still letting some asset production continue in parallel so team members were not just waiting for each other.

At the end of the meeting, we also discussed updates to the website and process documentation. The team decided to include the organised feedback spreadsheet and meeting outcomes as part of the website content, while continuing to update individual development logs. This reminded me that process documentation should not only record the final outcome. It should also record how the team made decisions based on test feedback, how we cut scope, and how we redistributed tasks.

This meeting helped me understand more clearly that Vertical Slice production is not about making everything from the GDD. It is about keeping the parts that best represent the core experience within a limited timeframe. For us, the stability of Chapter One, the clarity of player objectives, and basic interaction feedback were more important than adding combat, sprint, or a mini-map.

This also affected how I judged my own work afterwards. Instead of continuing to expand large mechanics systems that would be difficult to fully close in the short term, I needed to focus more on content that could directly improve the player experience and be tested more easily, such as UI feedback, interaction feedback, ambience, and spatial audio. This was not giving up on design. It was re-evaluating what was most worth implementing under the current production conditions.