Good evening, pillow castle denizens! Here’s another lovely update from our team about progress as we blaze a trail to GDC.
First – let’s get that extra special news out of the way… museum of simulation technology was accepted into the EXPERIMENTAL GAMEPLAY WORKSHOP 2014!
Yes!
The Experimental Gameplay Workshop is a prestigious forum at GDC where game-makers from around the world are invited to present the weird and wonderful work they’ve been doing in the world of video games. Often these games are far from complete or are just proof of concepts – right where our game is!
The great thing about EGW in our minds is that we’ve had the opportunity to put our game in front of a lot of non game developers to get their reaction – but we haven’t had a chance to put our ideas to the test against people who spend their days working on weird games. This is a great opportunity for us.
However, it does create some scheduling / production difficulties that we’ll have to deal with over the next two weeks as we crunch to hit our GDC goals.
The initial plan, to put the entire team working on the four initial levels of the Museum so that they can be playtested daily and refined is going to have to change slightly. We need new, creative puzzles to show the audience at EGW, and to fulfill that, Albert will be splitting off of the main level team to work on experimental puzzle levels.
These levels won’t have art or themeing, and they won’t be playtested outside of a few “does this make sense?” tests. Because Albert will get to drive the game during the presentation of these levels, we can cheat a little bit and save time on polish and presentation that we really don’t have. Two weeks is a short shot away from here!
On top of that, we’re attempting to design a new tutorial section for the game so that we can better explain our mechanics and the gameplay to novice users. We are expecting a large number of players at GDC will not have seen/experienced our game before, so we want to do as much work as we can to explain things to them in-game.
We will be testing the iterations on the first four levels and also the tutorial daily. We’ve got a new playtesting strategy – quality over quantity – and we feel that if we are able to get one or two really good, new “kleenex” playtesters a day, that can be just as useful as 4-5 people who may have seen or experienced the project before.
Playtesting has already shown us that we have a lot of work to do in the third and fourth levels (“fan” and “moon”) and Zhengyi, Yuxi, and Xiao are on top of making these levels work as smoothly as they can in the next two weeks.
Wish us luck!
