Hello from Pillow Castle!<\/p>\n
T-minus one week until we have to be on a plane to GDC – the team is anxious but working hard to meet our goals. The road to a successful IGF presentation is paved with scary deadlines and hard decisions, but we feel like we\u2019ve done everything we can to be ready for this once in a lifetime opportunity.<\/p>\n
Over the last two weeks, we\u2019ve been making small iterative changes to the first four puzzle levels in order to get as close as we can to a smooth, enjoyable experience for players. We will be on the floor with hundreds of people walking by – it\u2019s important that the audience not only see the game, but see the person playing it is enjoying themselves and isn\u2019t frustrated. No one likes a frustrating game.<\/p>\n
Along with those levels, we\u2019ve been playtesting our new tutorial section that Albert and Zhengyi built from scratch. \u00a0It isn\u2019t clever or creative, but that\u2019s the point – we want to make sure everyone reads, participates, and understands the rules of the game before we move too deeply in.<\/p>\n
The tutorial, however, isn\u2019t all that exciting to the playtesters – a lot of them have been skipping aspects of it because they think they already know what it says, or that it\u2019s not useful.<\/p>\n
People do not like to read text in video games, it turns out! \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n
We\u2019re going to try adding some other visual and audio queues with what limited time we have left to test. Next week is Spring Break here at home base Pillow Castle, which means all of our would-be playtester vacate the area for warmer climates. We\u2019ll be in the office, crunching away, panicking our little hearts out as we count down the hours til our Plane takes off.<\/p>\n
We aren\u2019t nervous or anything.<\/p>\n
The daily playtests have really helped us clean up a lot of the rough edges of the demo and we\u2019re starting to feel like we\u2019re in a good place for GDC. Albert\u2019s EGW levels are also coming along nicely, and he\u2019s got some sweet ideas cooked up for the crowd.<\/p>\n
Oh yeah, we also have to put together some presentations and stuff. Crap. Need to do that. There\u2019s always next week\u2026<\/p>\n
-Pillow Castle Out!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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