Month: September 2017

We’re getting pretty close to the home stretch now. There are only a few weeks left before our big debut at PAX Australia, and there is still plenty of work to get done.

We’ve been working hard to get everything looking as pretty as possible, and cramming in as many cool effects as we can.

Some of the cool new things we’ve included are new look level exits, new level transitions and reworked controls to simplify the player’s experience.

(Sorry I don’t have any cool gifs this week. I’ll work on getting stuff ready for next week promise!)

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We had another playtest at Bar SK last Wednesday as part of their WIP Wednesday show. We had a bit of a short notice to be part of this, so we didn’t have a brand new build ready to go.

But it was still a great night and we had some great feedback from the people who came through and played Level Squared. There were two other Swinburne games there for the same night, Unbond and Marballed: a pretty hefty Swinburne crew!

Some good things that I took away from our playtest:

• We set up a build at the start of the night, and exited out of it at the end. There were no restarts, reboots or reloads required. Our game is stable!
• For the most part (with a couple of exceptions) people were able to pick up the game and play it, without any interaction from us. The game communicates how to play it well enough that we don’t need to explain to players what to do.
• We’re getting better at our elevator pitch – but there’s room for improvement.

And things that we still need to work on:

• Some of our puzzles still need refining. The were a couple of notable places where players were getting stuck – these seem to be related to areas that require a fairly precise solution, but where it is pretty easy to get it wrong. These areas aren’t fun, and they aren’t particularly challenging, so they need to be worked on.
• As a team, we need to get better and drawing people in to play our game. We are all a bit introverted so don’t want to be reaching out to players to draw them in.

But overall, this was another successful outing for Level Squared!

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And lastly, I went to Alterconf last weekend. This was a tech and gaming conference that focuses on marginalised voices and issues. It was a really nice change to be in a conference (especially one on tech and gaming) that wasn’t a room full of white dudes! And the topics covered by all of the speakers were super interesting and important too.

You can follow that link above the see all of the speakers and the topics that they covered. Some of the topics included:

• Alayna Cole on Plurisexuality and Playersexuality. (Alayna shared her talk on twitter – you can see it here).
• Creatrix Tiara on the impact that visas can have on work and travel in the games industry.
• Susannah Emery on a game she is creating that deals with domestic violence.

For a good follow along with the talks on the day you can read through Maize Wallin’s tweets over the course of the day. Start here: https://twitter.com/MaizeWallin/status/911397304942264320 (also follow Maize, they’re great).

All of the talks had content warnings where appropriate and the entire mood at the talk was super positive and inclusive. I met and talked with a bunch of people and had a really enjoyable day. And it was so great to hear from people that are not always heard from talking about issues that are not discussed anywhere near as much as they should be.

I would recommend attending the next Alterconf!

Hi folks, nothing big or special to cover this week, so I’m going to do some looking forward instead for what is coming up over the next few weeks for Level Squared.

We’re basically at the point now that our mechanics are all bedded down and done. Our level structure is set up and ready to go. All-in-all, the game probably isn’t going to change a whole lot from here on out, in structural terms at least.

What I’m really saying here is – all the easy work is done.

Now we need to do all of the little tiny quality of life improvements that you probably won’t notice if they work properly, but you’ll sure as heck notice if they are bad.

Things like our tutorial. At the moment our tutorial has been pretty heavily text-based, with words on the screen explaining to the player how to project and which buttons to press. But something we have found (and which everyone probably already knows) is that players don’t read the text. Players much prefer to learn by doing. So we are re-working our tutorial to lead the player to press buttons and find out what they do, rather than us telling them what they do.

This is our current text-based turorial

What we do know from our testing so far is that once players grasp the projection mechanic they are comfortable using it, but there is a period at the beginning of the game that is difficult while they learn what to do. So our aim is to teach the player as painlessly as possible, so they can get on with the fun later levels.

In a somewhat related matter, we have in-game text sprinkled throughout our levels. There isn’t any overarching theme to this text at the moment. And while it adds a nice atmosphere to the game, it doesn’t convey anything specific to the player. We want to use this element to add something special to the game, whether that is telling the story of the player, or the world that they are in, or even setting a specific theme for each level.  It’s something that we are not taking full advantage of at the moment.

And finally, we want to add as much juice and flash to the game as we can. In the last week we have implemented animations on our player character for jumping and landing. This is very simple stretch and squish manipulation, but it adds a lot to the feel of playing and makes the jumping and landing feel more real as you play. Here’s an example:

New jumping animations in action!

So that’s what’s on the plate for the next few weeks!

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But before that – we have another, last minute, surprise appearance at Bar SK tomorrow night (Wednesday 20 September) For Work in Progress Wednesday!

So if you missed out last time, or even if you played last time and want to again, come and hit us up at Bar SK!

Hey folks. Sorry this one is a day late again, we took a new build of Level Squared along to the IGDA Melbourne meet up last night, and I didn’t get home till well after my bedtime…

But the play test went very well! We had a bunch of people play the build over the course of the night, and managed to get some really good feedback and take some good notes for further improvements. And despite a couple of players doing their best to break the game, it was pretty resilient and they weren’t able to wreak too much havoc. So I’m going to count that as a win!

And beyond that, this was our first play test under the new play test strategy that I discussed in last week’s blog. I’m pleased to report that it was a pretty clear success! We had our build tested and approved on Monday afternoon – more than 24 hours before the play test. A marked improvement over our previous early-morning-day-of builds for our previous play test sessions.

There were something that didn’t end up included in the build, just due to some people failing to realise when exactly lock dates were, or not being ready in time. And a few members maybe didn’t take the threat of being locked out 100% seriously until it was too late, but those are all part of the learning process.

Overall, this was a tremendous success and will be part of our build and play test strategy going forward.

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And finally, I’ll hope you’ll indulge me dipping into current Australian politics.

We are in the midst of a needless and hurtful public survey about whether non-heterosexual couples should be allowed to get married.

I am not a member of the LGBTQI+ community, nor am I married. I literally have no horse in this race. Yet I find the idea that I should have any sort of say in whether other people should be allowed to get married offensive and ridiculous.

That said, I will be voting a definite ‘YES’ in the survey, and I would urge all of my readers to do the same.

This survey is a last ditch attempt by those who oppose marriage equality to delay or prevent consenting adults getting married purely on the basis of their gender. Anything other than an overwhelming ‘YES’ vote will be taken by this group as a validation of their views, and this entire farcical survey has been set up in such a way as to ensure their preferred result. They should be met with a forceful and definite repudiation of their archaic views.

Fill in your survey as soon as you get it. Vote ‘YES’. It’s the right thing to do.

We held another playtesting session this week. This time it was with our fellow game development students in our regular class time.

Now I would be hoping by this stage that we would be old hands at playtesting and that the whole session went without any problems. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and there a few persistent problems coming up that will need to be addressed.

It is true that we have had a number of playtesting sessions so far. We have made public playtests a focus of our semester planning and planned for a few more sessions before we get to PAX.

We have gotten better at being ready for the session, having everything in place and making sure our controllers and sound all work and that our build is stable. We also record a lot of data from our play testing sessions and feed that data back into our development to improve our game.

However, on the downside, almost all of our playtest sessions have been preceded by a very late night session of development the night before. This has resulted in our being able to show a better product on the day of the test, but I don’t think that this practice is sustainable, and it’s probably only a matter of time before it causes a disaster.

There are two mistakes being made that are causing our late night sessions, I believe:

1.   We are not setting a date at which changes will stop being made to the game.
2.   We are not carrying out sufficient Quality Assurance at an early enough stage.

On all of our public play tests to date we have identified major game breaking bugs on the day before the playtest.

In an attempt to address these shortfalls, we have put in place a week long lead time for each of our upcoming play tests.

At a point at least seven days before the test we will all agree what we are aiming to have in that build. The next three days will be dedicated to building and implementing new features.

Then four days out from the test, we declare the build locked and enter the QA phase. This will be in-house testing to ensure that all of the changes are working as expected and that there have been no strange bugs introduced.

The only changes that will be taking place during this phase are to directly address any issues that have been identified by QA.

The primary goal of this new playtest strategy is to ensure we have no more 2AM development sessions immediately before playtests. And above that, it’s to ensure that we have stable and well-tested builds ready to show to the public so that we know that the feedback we will gather from playtests will relate to them playing the game, rather than getting stuck or having stop due to a game breaking bug.

We’ll be taking along a new build to test at the next IGDA Melbourne meet up on Tuesday 12 September, so this gives us an immediate chance to test out our new strategy! So if you’re going to be at IGDAM, look for Level Squared, and come and say hello (I’ll be the one with the notebook).