So, last month I was invited to take the show to the Yorkshire Games Festival in Bradford, so I said yes before my self consciousnesses had the chance to talk me out of it.
Oh boy, I'm glad I did.
But it I didn't start well. It was just over an hour long drive, but I've not been to Bradford since my Grandad (who had lived there) passed away over 2 decades ago. I didn't drive when I was 11 years old, so it was a mini-nightmare getting there. I took a couple of wrong turns and even managed to earn myself a speeding fine on a road that I wasn't even meant to be on.
So, I finally get there and I walk into the venue. I'm stressed out. I'm immediately daunted by the fact that the National Media Museum is a really impressive building (because, it's the National Media Museum, why would I expect otherwise?).
And then John Romero walks past. He looks really cool, much cooler than me (although, in hindsight, a lot shorter than I had expected he would be). I didn't know that John Romero was going to be there. Clearly, I was out of my depth here.
I think one of the volunteers could see I needed a little help, as she soon wandered over and helped me find my stand. And I'm rambling already aren't I? I hope you're all strapped in for a long in for a long ride...
Anyway, once I'd got over myself, the festival was awesome!
People were queuing to play the game!?
Well, when I say awesome, what I mean is horrible. Soul crushingly horrible. But, soul crushingly horrible in an awesome way!
Let me explain.
I'd seen friends play the game, and I'd seen fellow developers play the game. Usually this was with me explaining how it worked and why things did the things they did.
So, I had decided before the event that I would take the opportunity to observe how normal people (normal as in, not my friends and not fellow developers, none of whom can in any way be considered 'normal') interact with the game. As in, what the conversation is between the player and the way the game feeds back to them - does it communicate things in the way that I think it does?
The short answer was a resounding 'NO!'
I'd hastily put together a 'tutorial' that introduced you to the basics, to understand how the game would be controlled differently to how you were expecting (huh, there's no jump!?). It took me less than a minute to complete. I don't like tutorials, so I was pretty happy with that.
People died. In the tutorial. People were dieing in the tutorial. I mean, that's the third rule of game dev (after 'you don't talk about game dev' and 'you don't talk about game dev'): don't kill players in the tutorial*.
I don't know why people didn't just give up. Maybe they could see the desperate look in my eyes.
To be honest, after 3 hours of watching people die in the tutorial, I realised I had nothing more to learn from watching people die in the tutorial and decided to just quickly explain what the tutorial should be teaching you anyway.
I have half a notebook full of notes that I took from the festival, so here's a little highlight reel of some of the observations I made:
- Make more destructible things, so that the player has more opportunity to understand the relationship between the sword and the world (and smashing stuff is fun)
- Slow down the speed of the sword spinning back to Mable so you can actually see/feel it - people don't understand that the sword is even moving...
- Nobody realises that the shrines heal you. Stop them healing you and just spit out some hearts out when you light it [side note: this had the effect of adding tension as the hearts bounce away from you and you're desparate for the health]
The biggest learning point however, was that you can guide people with sweet and/or shiny things. This is something that I actually learned from something outside of the game. I gave people sweets:
I didn't have much room to fit everything on the table, so I left the cards in front of the sweets. As it turned out, everyone who reached for a sweet also took a card!
End of day 1 - should have got more cards (or less sweets)
I'd also been watching people really struggle with this section of the first vertical mountain level:
You have to go up!
The problem here is that it's a much harder challenge if you try it from the left, because the moving spike beneath you pulls you away from where you need to be. Whether it's because we're in the West and we read left to right, or if it's because the past few decades of games have taught us that you always go left to right, or something else, I don't know - but everyone tried it from the left. Over and over.
I thought about blocking off the wall. Then I remembered the sweets! So, I did this:
How embarrassing that I still messed it up while recording the GIF...
And now, everyone tries it from the right hand side! And, most people get it in the first couple of tries (which is just what I want for this far into the game).
Overall, I feel as though taking the game to the festival has been a massive step in the development process. I'd never realised just how much you can learn from watching people sit down with your game and just start playing it. The game is sooooooo much better as a result of this, and I have a huge list of more stuff to make it better!
I also met some really cool people, which has led to a number of interesting opportunities for Mable. One of those opportunities was...
Insomnia FestivalFrom talking to various people at the Yorkshire Games Festival, I got put in touch with one of the organisers for Insomnia. If you don't know about Insomnia, it's a gaming festival that takes place at the NEC in Birmingham and sees around 60,000 people turn up over a weekend.
Sixty. Thousand. People.
It wasn't really something I couldn't try and get Mable to, especially since I'd made so many changes to it that I wanted to test out!
Fortunately, even though applications were closed, they loved Mable and managed to get me a slot in the Indie Zone.
It was amazing.Although, it got pretty busy:
For a sense of scale, that green and black thing at the back is a double-decker bus!
I got myself a nice little booth:
Taking secret photos of people is totally legal, right?
My friend Justin made me a nice poster (for the price of 2 pints):
And I got some badges (that I really loved and wish I'd got more of):
I got 101 of these, and they ran out half way through Saturday.
The experience was amazing.
Some people genuinely LOVED the game. Several people tweeted at me afterwards (and I got a very very nice email) saying how much they loved it, how it was the best game at the show. It was a little bit overwhelming to be honest.
I watched some people give up and walk away, and I felt good about this. It proved to me that I wasn't making a mediocre game.
What I'm trying to say is: if everyone was just like, 'yeah that was pretty good' or 'hmm yeah that's ok I guess' then I'd think everything was just hunky dory. Instead, the game seemed to generally invoke one of the extremes. I'd rather make something that some people love, even if some people also hate it. I guess it tells me that I'm doing something right, which is nice.
I also took the opportunity to set my laptop up on the Sunday and do a little bit of live testing on people. It was actually really cool to keep firing new things over and have people test little tweaks and fixes to things! People were oddly into watching me code too, despite me clearly not having any idea what I was doing.
Here's the most stable build that I had on the show floor. Ignore the level design in the swamp and cave levels, they're slightly tweaked versions of the Kickstarter demo that are only in there for these kind of events (in other words, they're a bit rubbish).
So yeah, a pretty busy month! Fortunately there's nothing much happening in December, right?
Community
