Sadly I am currently unable to show you my final project at the moment as it takes a bit of setup and file download and, although it worked great for the one night of the exhibition it was needed to work it has since decided it doesn't fancy it. I am awaiting a meeting with my co-designer, Francis so we can plan continued development and figure out the bugs. But not to worry! We should also be recording some footage of gameplay and taking a few high-res screens to show off to all you lovely people. Onto the show and the lessons learned.
2spooky4me guys!
First up, never put a barrier between you and your audience! For the show Francis and myself had secured a space separate from most others pieces, a double-edged sword. Being right near the entrance but not in full view of it we felt people were walking past without even stopping to look in a lot of the time. That wasn't such a big deal as we were able to grab people in by asking if they wanted to play. The problem was that initially, we had decided to hang a white sheet over our entrance onto which we stuck a Victorian silhouette of a man in a top hat. This was removed with great speed and placed on the table holding the TV. Putting that sight barrier up did us some damage in terms of foot traffic. We had assumed it would add to the mystery of the thing, make people wonder what was behind the curtain. Well apparently everyone had read The Wizard of Oz that night and figured that whatever was behind the curtain wasn't going to be any better than a fat man in a suit with a bunch of empty promises. That or they thought it was storage. Either way, that might have been ok to do had others been set up similarly and nearer to us. Line of sight is important and we broke that, didn't do enough to draw people in. The show was on the inside of the booth and really there should have been more outside of it to entice people in the first place. Hard lesson learned well!
"I can toooooootally show you a good time, don't you
trust my warm smile and happy, sunshine eyes?" (Source)
Anyway, sheet removed we soldiered on through some technical issues, got them solved and continued to show the game. We had a nice chat with Maria, a producer from Sony UK who gave us some advice on how to better present our game for a pitch meeting and the things she would like to see from us and the game, so perhaps we'll spend a little time creating a build closer to what she wanted for showing to industry types. For the course we had to design a more complete experience than what we might have made for a pitch meeting, because that's the brief we had and that's how we were marked. What Maria would have liked to see was one room where everything worked the way it was supposed to and we could show off all the important mechanics and features of the game. So there's a little life lesson for you budding designers and developers looking for funding; short, sweet, compact and dense with polished content, or as much of that as you can manage in the time frame you have.
Most of the reactions we had were very positive and encouraging, there were a few salient points we took away with us. We were aware going in that our controls weren't amazingly polished, but we'd had to do a last minute build before the show began and before we had time to make edits. This left our forward movement relatively smooth but our turning and rotation was a little clunky and slow, but that was an issue with a simple fix. One thing we picked up on throughout the course of the evening was the importance of playtesting. We had kept the project mostly under wraps, saying little and showing even less and the show was the first time anyone had played our game. We discovered so many things from people simply playing through the experience. Even though it's something I've read about and had drummed into me for years, "Playtest, playtest, playtest" it had completely slipped my mind for this one and suddenly the mystique was more important. I think there's a balance that can be achieved between secrecy and still allowing for playtesting and in this case it was tipped too far in the wrong direction. But there's nothing like an experience to teach you a lesson. But seriously, playtest!
"It isn't a storage area? Really?" (Source)
All-in-all we had some great advice, some super positive feedback and learned some really important things from the show and having people play our game. I look forward to keeping everyone updated on the further development of Libella and hopefully screens and gameplay vids will be uploaded soon. Keep your eyes here and on my Twitter feed for more in the coming months.
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