Man, it must be so cool to see your game running on a big screen with so many people around playing it.
Seeing it for the first time, it's pretty surreal. Sure, it's only like 30 people you already know, but it's an accomplishment.
did you get any good feedback/results? I would love to do a test session like that. Even if I let one friend play and watch him, I get so much more insight that I would've otherwise.
This is actually the main reason I show my games at meetups. In-person feedback is invaluable. It is a zillion times more useful than any online feedback you might get. You actually see things that frustrate players that they might not mention otherwise. You will see tiny little annoyances and flaws in your controls, content, and mechanics that you would never notice yourself. People will point out things and ask questions about stuff that you never really thought about. People will give you bad advice (expected) but will also give you their first reactions and what they think of the game in a sentence or two. People will undermine your entire game for a few moments as they point out some very major flaw, which you will slowly realize is not as catastrophic as you thought (hopefully!). This is invaluable for making an enjoyable game.
I have a question that's been eating away at my mind for a few weeks now. I'm not sure what to do about the release. I've got three scenarios in mind:
* Release for free as-is, with no plans for a commercial sale. Obviously, this is the easiest. However, I am really excited about the idea of...
* Selling the game after some extra polish and addition of more content. The current game would be released as a demo (perhaps with just a few minor limitations to upsell the paid version).
* Release for free as-is, but keep working on a much bigger kind of game (Urverden) with wilderness and towns and NPCs and all sorts of other procedurally generated stuff that will take at least a year or two to complete, with plans to sell that. SWOOOORDS would remain as a "combat prototype" for this much bigger game.
I've done a lot of research on indie game marketing and I feel like I've got to decide now and then do the release based on my future plans. It seems like if I wanted to sell the game, it would be best to release the demo and the paid version simultaneously so that people who like the demo could immediately buy the game. If I took the other options, I would of course just release it soon and trickle out updates like I've already been doing for the bigger commercial project.
I need to get a final playtest pass organized with some local people, stuff has been really busy at work so it's just been hard to get it together. After that playtest, I will undoubtedly run into some extra work needing to be done, and I'll need to fix a few remaining bugs and UI stuff remaining. I bumped up the thread title to 90%!
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