Category: WDATHG

So we decided now was a good time to test the game on the unsuspecting public. My long suffering concubine helped me print out various flyers and a huge poster, and we dragged three laptops to Southampton, for their game festival.

Reactions were very positive across the board – our test subjects played the game for an average of ten or fifteen minutes as they worked their way through the demo puzzles.

One of our laptops had a graphics card – the other two were running on software emulation, but still managed to be perfectly playable. The apple mac threw away some of the textures because… well, macs. Still, for an experimental build on a frequently idiotic platform, it acquitted itself quite well. I shall allow the laptop to live.

A frequent suggestion was to get ourselves a twitter and a facebook, so I’ve dutifully added these facilities. New links have been added to the home page. I have no idea what to do with Twitter, but I’m assured it’s essential. We also learnt a fair bit about the game’s learning curve. Some players, like Marci, took the game apart like a surgeon – I think she’s played a fair bit of this genre before. Others required a gentle nudge here and there – which isn’t surprising, the puzzles would normally be encountered after the player has learnt a lot of the mechanics.

  Business cards are a must at trade shows.

So many thanks to everybody who played the game across the day, and kept our laptops in constant use. We had so much enthusiastic feedback, we’re more certain than ever that this game is worth completing. We’re still many months away from release, but we might go to more of these game shows – actual human interaction is very healthy, plus we get to see which parts of the game require further work or explanation. Many thanks also to the Southampton Games Fest 2017 for hosting our game and providing a pile of power adaptors for all our kit.

On this page you can also find the images we used for flyers and posters. Tip – when printing a poster that’s around two metres tall, black doesn’t necessarily come out as well on print as on the screen.

Using a bewildering array of poorly understood midi equipment, I’ve set a bold new standard in perfectly adequate game music with this title theme.

Featured equipment : Novation Remote LE 61, M-Audio X-Session Pro, Chase digital piano, lots of pretty samples and arpeggios, including Rob Papen Blue 2 and my knackered old Roland D-10 synth. The tune is currently barely mixed or positioned – that’s a job for studio time.

Naturally the game will require many further tunes. One thing we’d like to do is give the deserted halls and corridors a bit of personality. Many of the humans who used to work in the abandoned labs have left their personal music collections where they used to work – and we’ll have a sufficiently eclectic mix of electronic and acoustic music playing from their radios. We intend to contact some bands who might wish to have a tune featured in the game, and anybody is welcome to send us material they’ve written.

An RPG without a menu is like a restaurant without a … menu.

To that end our game is going to require menu popups, than can be opened or closed on demand. The menu presence on screen needs to be modest and unassuming, so you can keep the main screen mostly free for running away from things while screaming. Stacked menus are the way to go, with a big shiny button to close or open everything at once.

Of utmost importance is the inventory screen, where you will hoard your modest collection of stuff. Also a Stats screen where you can increase your various lowly skills. A Map – sure, we’ll stick in one of those too. A Radar? Why not – it’s only my precious coding time you’re wasting.

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The inventory screen currently contains a vast number of rocks. Rocks seem to be a staple of this particular genre, and I’m happy to slavishly follow the trend. Of course by the time the game is made, these may have changed to Future Rocks, Space Cubes, Robo Parts or somesuch sci-fi shenanigans.

 

After much swearing and weeping I’ve convinced the inventory to handle useful tasks like stacking items of a similar type, and all the usual things like transferring items to the world, activating health packs and making sure you don’t put a rock in your gun slot. Madam. There are also tons of multi-function buttons, so you can track armour values, total stamina or go to a full screen scrolling map, depending on preference. We can even handle touch screen, mouse or buttons. I’m a people pleaser.

One last addition – a comms channel. This keeps a record of all the text and dialogue you encounter, plus it features doorpad hacking facilities that I have no idea how to implement yet. So there’s that.

Can you see any signs that I’m overusing the one texture pack I bought? No, you cannot. You’re just happy to be here, reading out-of-copyright quotes from Ernest Hemingway

In many RPGS, especially those from our friends in Japan, it is quite easy to lose track of your next objective. The comms screen will remember your most recent conversations and directions, which should prove handy if you’ve recently taken a blow to the head.

As an aside, note the out-of-date ocean, which I will soon be updating with something slightly less polluted.