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I hate how distracting discussions like this can get. One of the reasons why we make our work is that we can’t communicate the things that interest us in words. Words are so tiring. And always wrong.
Back to work! 🙂
I was adding a new feature to the game in response to some of the test results: guides to finding things in the game world, presented in the form of unlockable functionality. We would even remove some guiding systems from the beginning of the game and unlock them as the players makes progress. Rationally I know it makes perfect sense to do this, and it will almost certainly improve the experience for almost all players. It prevents frustration and it allows for communicating play instructions bit by bit. But implementing the feature made me feel so dirty. Withholding information from the player, even if it is for their own good, is not something that comes naturally to us as designers.
Though it does to us as storytellers. So maybe that’s a way to approach the problem…
Making this post a few days later so my recollections are not as fresh as with the other tester reports…
This player made me realise how immersive The Path can be. She came at 9 in the morning started playing around 10, after coffee. She was really eager to start playing! Told us she needed to leave around 2 in the afternoon. Before any of us realized, it was time for her to go. Time flew! I take that as a good sign. Seems one can play for a long period of time without getting fatigued or getting bored.
We had tackled many of the show stopping bugs of previous play sessions so she experienced no crashes at all! Yes! There was only one major glitch. And we noticed some issues with finding things in the forest that we will improve. She was able to play as each of the girls and gave us a really good chance to make lists of what we will need to put into a manual and what information we can convey through the game itself. As a casual gamer (she’d played many browser-based games, for example) she was able to give us insights as to what attracted her to our game. This is useful to know as we hope to market heavily to adults who think 3d video games are “for kids.”
I am very pleased by the variety of people we are having over for these testing days!
It occured to me this morning as I watched tester #4 play that we are asking a lot of patience on the part of players of The Path. So many times we are forcing people with the design to slow down, build tension, look around carefully, let go of control. It will be interesting to find out how many people find this an attractive aspect of the game… will get the idea why we are wanting them to do that… or will it just be a source of urges to skip the cut-scenes push the girls to do what you want, run faster, etc. not that any of that will do you any good. 😉
He was a bit impatient with the game I think. Still enjoyed himself though.
It was exhausting to see that as bugs get fixed others spring up, where you least expect them. Wish some of these would just magically disappear… lets see if little elves sneak in and do all the fixes while we sleep tonight! 🙂
Tags: testersWhere did October go? It flew by! Looking back, though, I feel like we have made the transition from a game under construction to a game that is nearly finished.
The overall structure was cleaned up and the last remaining design issues were resolved, completing the gameplay aspects of The Path. We tend to design a game in broad strokes and some of the details are only filled in at the last moment. Which was now. It feels good.
Halfway through the month we put together a super-tight schedule for asset creation of all the remaining things. It’s amazing how quickly you can fill up a month with things that all seem relatively simple by themselves. But it helped us feel more certain about our ability to achieve our production deadline. As long as we stick to the schedule, we’ll be fine.
We also finished the remaining Red Girls this month and published pictures of them. That was an important milestone. There’s still some work to do on the other characters in the game but at least the avatars are finished. And they look lovely! We’re very proud of them. Auriea, Laura and Hans did an excellent job! Thanks to the pictures -and the girls’ Livejournals- they already seem to have started a life of their own in the imaginations of the public.
Towards the end of the month, we invited people to come and test the game. We would sit them in front of a computer and observe how they play, slowly giving more guidance as they get deeper into the game. The results of the tests had significant impact on the priorities of our to do list. Especially on the “process” side of things, the schedule got rearranged quite a bit. We wanted to fix problems that came up in one test and then see if our solution worked in the next test. So responding to the test results suddenly became my priority.
As a result some of the things I had planned to do in October, remain unfinished as they were moved to next month. The tests made us realize that our game was indeed nearing completion, as the testers really did look they were playing a game, and not just testing some interactive processes, like Auriea and I tend to do all the time. A lot of very interesting things came up during the tests. Some serious bugs. But also issues relating to gameplay, interface and communication within the game. I believe that our response to these issues will greatly increase the enjoyment of many players. So we should all be very grateful to the testers!
We had scheduled three months of what we call “authoring”, to fine-tune the game after all assets and systems are created. But it looks like we won’t have such a clearly defined period. On the one hand, there simply is no time. But on the other, it feels a lot more efficient to coordinate this authoring effort with observing and talking to people who test the game. Rather than simply following our own artistic instincts. At this point, we may be too close to the game and unable to tell the important things apart from the less important ones. Seeing how other people play with our game really helps to put these things in perspective.
We have also discovered some annoying technical problems. Installing software on Vista is apparently not the same as on XP. For some reason, a newly installed game is able to access saved data that I thought was uninstalled. We will need to look into this. And then there’s some serious issues with the game either taking a long time or plain crashing on exit. Luckily the game engine‘s main programmer is helping us to resolve the issue.
We want to have The Path done by the end of the year. So that there is sufficient time for the creation of marketing graphics, a trailer, perhaps a demo, for communicating with publishers and distributors and organizing a launch event. It’s going to be tough. We’re probably in what is called a crunch period now. And while we do make tangible progress and it’s really nice to see the game flower, I think this period is too long. We’ve been crunching for two, perhaps three months now and there’s another two months to go. We’re going to need a serious vacation after this!