At last, somebody besides me got to play my game. Several people, actually. Getting to watch people experience something I made was a very unique experience. Most people liked it. Some people it was hard to tell what they thought about it. One kid just got up and walked away two minutes in.
The process was simple: I’d tell people the genre of the game, and that my job was to sit back, shut up, and watch them learn to play it on their own. If they needed help, I’d step in and help them through it. I’d watch them play and take notes on what they did, how they did it, where they struggled to understand something, where something broke and why, and any improvements or suggestions they thought the game needed. I learned a lot from this, mostly that my game is even more of a broken mess than I thought it was, and there are a lot of parts that are unintuitive and need to be explained better or made clearer.
Most of my work this week was polishing my game and fixing the really broken parts, or just disabling anything that couldn’t be fixed in time, so there’s nothing new to report. Next week I’ll be hammering away at everything I’ve learned, and can now increment my version number to 0.2.0. Exciting.
One thing I’ve noticed compared to other devs is that I haven’t been discouraged from abandoning this project. A lot of devs seem to get burnout on their game after this much time put into it, but that hasn’t happened to me and hopefully it never will. Maybe I’m just being naive, or ignorant, but I really think this game has potential to be special and I hope to see it all the way through. One thing that helps me stay in perspective is understanding that making a game is a marathon, not a sprint. For example, look at games like Minecraft or SCP: Containment Breach and look at their very first public demos, and how they grew gradually over time into what they are today. It’s cool seeing a game grow from just a bunch of pixels on a screen into something playable and, if you’re lucky, fun.
I’ll also be foregoing the Game of the Week segment in the meantime since I don’t have much time to play games outside of making my own, as well as the secondary tasks that come with it. Making game very hard work, please understand.
