Immense progress is happening with Pandomime Studio’s first ever title, Beasties of Greenhollow. This weekend marked one of the biggest steps we have taken yet. A proper alpha test of our demo! We actually had a previous build we offered up for people to try, but considering how hectic things are in the real world, it’s no surprise no one took us up on it. We might add that alpha build to the site when everything is said and done as it’s surprisingly different from even the demo. The current demo build is pretty close to what the full game will be like, albeit much shorter and experience. All in all I think it’s possible to dash through the demo in twenty minutes if you know what you’re doing. And that’s the catch, isn’t it? When it comes to a new title with fresh game play, it’s very dangerous to just assume people will ‘figure it out’. This was our downfall with the alpha test! Overall the game is actually intentionally simple and small. As our first project our goal was really to design and finish something within three months. We’ll be edging slightly into four months but as the director, I felt this was a reasonable addition of time and I think the game deserves the extra budget for polish. However, just because something seems simple and obvious to us, the makers, doesn’t mean it is so with literally anyone else. Onboarding is something that should never be taken lightly. Just because you have a tutorial in place, don’t assume it’s enough. It’s way better to be annoyingly overt than to risk players being left out. If players don’t understand the core controls of your game, guess what? They’ll assume the game itself is broken and badly made. And in a way, they’ll be justified in thinking this. If your game lacks accessibility, for many users it might as well be a broken buggy mess. Here’s an awesome video I watched yesterday and it definitely stung a bit when they got to the part about onboarding;
Long story short, we’re back at it adding a much better tutorial. This time we’re going above and beyond to really pace ourselves and take the player by the hand. last night I sat at my desk long after I clocked off my day job to write a very detailed script for the new tutorial. The extra dialogue will introduce the players to the gameplay and world in a much slower and friendlier way. It makes starting up the game feel a lot less rushed I have to say and it also proved an opportunity to introduce another character who will be of great importance to later titles in this series.
A quick concept doodle for the new character that will introduce the bigger tutorial.
As for how this impacts our schedule, well it adds work for sure. We were planning on releasing the game closer to the end of February. However with these changes and also some vacation time, it will probably be closer to mid March. While I was really hoping to start our next project– a free open source game!– I realize that it’s much more important to be patient with the task at hand and let it become the little jewel it deserves to be. BoG might be a humble and small game; it probably won’t revolutionize the indie scene; but as our first project we need to learn everything we can from it and make sure it’s a good game!