To all the lovely worms who participated in our December ‘24 playtest: thank you all so much!

If you missed out, don’t worry! Although this was our first playtest it certainly won’t be our last — we got so much great feedback from y’all through this process, and we’re really excited to put into into action.

So that said, here’s a quick look at some of the interesting stats and feedback we collected:

The Most Dateable NPC:

• At 35%, Josh won the prize for most "investi-dated" suspect (though some folks mentioned they picked him as he seemed the most suspicious)

• Overall there was an fairly even distribution between the 3 romanceable characters featured in our demo!

• We KNOW a bunch of you wanted to date Yamato the Security Guard — don’t worry, we gotchu! ;^)

Playtester’s Top Keywords:

We asked players how they’d describe the game to a friend and formulated the stunning word cloud above to show off the most common answers!

• Finding out y’all found the game funny was a big ego boost. <3

• Special mentions to “skux”, “swag” and “gayyyyyyy” — very important and core to our marketing strats.

What y’all wanna see:

Much like a sample box of biscuits, the Playtest Demo was a taster of our plans for the full game! We wanted to know what features folks were anticipating most!

• Most in-demand features are: DEDUCTION PUZZLES and SOCIAL LINKS / ROMANCE

• Playtesters asked more detailed mystery elements (we’ll be developing this!)

• Playtesters also wanted more elaborate secrets, lore and character details to sniff out during gameplay, which we’ll defs be working on!

What Needs Improving:

To all playtesters: we really appreciated everyone’s honesty with what elements need work to make ShelfLife feel super smooth!

• Awkward controls was one of our big issues, which we’ll work on!

• Many players wanted more freedom to explore, take their time and get immersed in the world, which we’re keen to provide!

• Widescreen monitors HATED the demo! BIG thanks to those who gave us feedback on this, we have a few ideas on how to solve this now!!!

HUGE THANKS + Next Steps:

A huge digital hug from the Fnife team for everyone who helped us out with this playtest! We’re going to be taking on all of the feedback provided (obviously a lot of it was more granular that what we’ve shared here) and continue to work on ShelfLife: Art School Detective with this info in mind.

The main conclusions we’ve drawn from this process is that we’re on the right track, but that we need to remember to equally develop the Detective and Social / Dating Sim elements of the game so that the balance feels satisfying.

We’re looking forward to sharing a longer, more branching and explorative closed-demo for playtesting later in the year, so stay tuned for that!

Thanks again,
xoxo Fnife Games