So I should say the real MVP for this whole trip was my wife. Without her it would’ve been me mumbling random Japanese phrases, gesturing at the wall-of-text tutorials, and sucking air through my teeth, sympathetically, each time something happened. Obviously this is a bit of hyperbole, I did actually run the booth in my broken Japanese a couple of times, but she definitely did a much, much better job than me going "aka ao ao ki ki" like a malfunctioning Furby.
This was kind of a trial run to see if we both enjoyed the experience and both of us had a great time. Mostly because everyone, other developers and the players, were just really nice.
The Booth!
Before things opened j__mon and @renkotsuban both came over and had a play. Which was really cool of them and put me at ease, as I got a flow for how things work.
Our setup was pretty low key compared to others with racks of goodies and giant posters. And I'm fine with that, but I think not having a tablecloth did look a bit amateur hour and maybe even a little disrespectful - as one of its purposes is to avoid damaging the table.
Flyers
I printed 100 flyers for Witching Stone and I have five left! I think in hindsight I should have put my social media on there rather than just store pages, but I don’t really use Twitter anymore and have never attributed it to any kind of success. And cohost seems to mostly be English only so...
Session Timing
My prediction was after 10 minutes people would either have beaten the demo or died! So I decided not to set up a timer or anything as that seemed like an unnecessary stress factor. But this was extremely wrong with most runs going on for 20 minutes or more.
Most people did play to the end, which is definitely a positive in its own right, but one person was stuck waiting for a really long time. They were super chill about it! But I still felt bad. I still think a timer is gross so maybe I just make a condensed map with less fights and knock half the health off the boss.
I also want the final game to clock in at around ~30m once players know what they're doing and, while these were new players, the first floor being 20 minutes probably means I need to rethink things.
Aftermath
While the experience was positive, I didn’t think this would have much effect in regards to me becoming a videogame millionaire and, yeah, there’s been one tweet and ten wishlists on this day, lol - just in case you’re worried I’m mainstream now from the previous post! But that’s fine, I didn’t go to TGD4 for that, because that would be silly.
I got to see people play my game for the first time which was very informative, enjoying my game which is very motivational, and the whole event put a burning boot up my ass by imposing an imposing deadline. I had to come up with a game name, key assets, launch the Steam store, make tutorials, try making art, try making animations, balance the first act of content, etc. Which has setup my next milestones towards Next Fest. I also got to meet some cool people and I’m hoping I can bump into them again.
Game Feedback
In mobile, a lot of people use Playtest Cloud to gather feedback, and then producers pivot everything based on the musings of Marguerite, an old lady living in Texas who is 1mm away from her mic. This whole trip, including buying flyers and desk decorations, was cheaper than getting 5 people to play for fifteen minutes on there, and a lot more useful in terms of obeserving players and getting feedback.
Deceptive Design
Fire Blast is 9 damage (3x base budget) and Exhaust (cast once). This is not a bad spell at all! Doing three rounds of damage instantly can carry early fights by wiping out a single enemy, sometimes the only enemy, and later players can double dip on upgrades, get around the exhaust restriction with spells like Arcane Retain (if cast first, exhaust is ignored) or Meta Magic (next spell cast is replaced with a random spell), or just swap it with something else when it falls off! But it's very easy to watch trusty Fire Blast clean up and then walk into the boss with 44 health and go oh no.
Honestly, I'm not sure if this is a game problem or a convention problem. I think I would comment this out next time, as I commented out a few double-edged upgrades, but I don't really want to lose it.
Hitpoint Slogs
Two enemies can summon additional monsters and both of these fights get a bit boring. The problem isn’t that the adds aren’t fun, because they do make the fight more interesting, but cleaning up once the major threat is gone takes too long. So I think additionals will have a tag that means they’ll disappear if only tagged enemies remain OR they’ll flee if they’re the last remaining enemy (these would be useful in different fights, but I will not do both).
Tutorials
The tutorials are walls of text and even with me standing right there a lot of people just clicked them away immediately.
But I've done the hand-holdy tutorials where we give players a preconfigured grid and tell them the move to do, but nobody internalises why they're doing any of this stuff. It's just a waste of everybody's time.
I am fairly confident that everyone who played the game understood it perfectly by the end, and would have crushed it on run two.
