This weekend, I demoed Tinselfly at IndieCade East. It was only a two hour slot, but wow did I get a lot of feedback — I got way more traffic there than I got at other, all-day type events I’ve done before.
It’s… a lot to process.
And it needs to be processed; I should neither follow every suggestion everyone made, nor forget what was said and done in those two hours. And, in fact, if I’m thinking in terms of following-or-not-following suggestions, I’m probably thinking about it wrong.
the audience
I’ve demoed Tinselfly maybe four or five times now, but this event was new to me in that it seemed entirely populated by, well, people who were really into video games. Most of the events I’ve been at before were not specifically game related: they were more family-oriented fair type things where each exhibitor table was showing very different things that might broadly appeal to random people walking around a fair.
So at first the crowd at IndieCade threw me off; they were giving helpful comments, but they were different sorts of comments than I was used to. In the future, I should try to get to know the individuals playing my game just a little. If a person who’s, for example into highly competitive games gives me a comment, that context is important. In many ways, the comments people give are less important that the unfulfilled expectations the player had, that prompted the comment — like, the expectation that there might be different weapons in my game, or leveling up. Which there won’t be.
I can’t (and shouldn’t try to) meet everyone’s expectations, but at the very least, continuing this example, I should make it clear from the beginning of the game that there are no weapon or skill upgrades; that character advancement, such as it is, happens in a fundamentally different way than most games. That’s something I need to communicate very clearly.
bugs
Thankfully, there weren’t any outright bugs anybody discovered that I didn’t know about already. However, it was still interesting and useful to see how the bugs manifested themselves — if at all — during the demo.
For example, in the very first scene there’s this staircase where you can walk through railings in the middle of the staircase, and you could walk off the edge of the staircase, which had no railings on the edge at all. And nobody walked through those railings or off the stairs, not even this one guy who was specifically trying to break things. I was kind of surprised.
So seeing which bugs came up and how often gave me some clues as to how to prioritize fixes for everything.
attention grabbing
There’s a part in the beginning of the demo where the player loses control of the camera briefly. One player really didn’t like that, and to be honest, I don’t like it any more than he did. It’s a brute-force solution to the problem of figuring out how to draw attention to things you want the player to notice.
In general, it looked like I really, really need to work on directing the player’s attention. The most egregious failure was that when starting a sword fighting duel, players frequently looked away from the area where their opponent would appear, before their opponent showed up. And then it wasn’t clear what to do because the opponent wasn’t visible on screen.
I… don’t have any specific thoughts on that right now. Just something to think about.
style changes
As you’re walking down those railing-less stairs, the point of view changes from third person to first. Many players stopped immediately when that happened, thinking that they’d accidentally pushed some pov-switching key.
I want the presentation to change based on the needs of the current scene; I think that’s an important storytelling tool. And I want the player reminded as often as possible that they’re playing a character with her own personality and goals and body. Among other things, that means being third person in open spaces and first person in confined ones.
But if players are getting confused by the switching, that’s a problem. I need to make it clear what’s happening, and more importantly, why.