Month: October 2017

Well we’re just about at the end of the road now. There’s only one more week of development before we are showing off Level Squared at PAX Australia, and there’s not a whole lot more to be done to get ready.

The last of our merch arrived this week. We have special square badges to give away to anyone who plays Level Squared over the weekend.

And now we are just down to final polishing and play testing before PAX. WE had a play test at The Arcade on Monday with the game developers who work there. We uncovered one new bug that we had not encountered before (good timing) and learned a little bit more about our tutorial and level progression, identifying one particular point that a lot of players had trouble. So we’re working on ironing out those last few kinks and then we should be ready to go!

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On a more disappointing note, we found out this week that Level Squared was not selected to be part of the Student Showcase at GCAP.

I took this harder than I expected, given that it wasn’t really something that we were working towards and was more of an icing on the cake type of deal. But it still feels pretty rubbish to not make the cut for something of this level of prestige.

However, two of the teams that are part of our same course DID make the cut and are going to be shown at GCAP. So congratulations to Unbond (unbondgame.com) and Carta (cartathegame.com/)! Keep an eye out for them at GCAP.

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Next week is Melbourne International Games Week. I’m going to be preeeeeetttttttyyyy busy next week, so there may not be a post next week (or I might get super inspired and write a bunch who knows?

I’m going to be volunteering at GCAP Loading on Sunday, then attending GCAP Tuesday and Wednesday. Setting up for PAX on Thursday, then showing Level Squared at PAX Friday to Sunday.

So if you’re going to be at any of those and happen to run into me – say hi!

We’re now well into the final weeks of building Level Squared, and there really isn’t a whole lot more to do before PAX. This is very good, because there is very little time in which to do anything before PAX.

We’ve been keeping ourselves busy with polishing the game as best we can. In the last week we’ve implemented new sound effects for a lot of things including for undoing projections, being unable to undo any further, level transitions and menu selections. We’ve also been making little adjustments like randomly pitch shifting sound effects that play a lot of times – like our jumping sound effect – so that they don’t get too monotonous.

We also made a new level transition effect that warps out of the existing level and into the new one – check it out!

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We heard a talk on Monday from Chris Wright of Surprise Attack about preparing for and showing a game at a trade show.

We’re in a slightly odd position here because we aren’t building or designing our stand as we’ll be showing as part of the Swinburne Showcase. So the info about how to design a stand wasn’t of immediate use to us, but will likely be useful if we ever do something like this again.

The remainder of the talk was really helpful though, and gave us some great info that we will be keeping in mind for PAX. It included info like:

• Knowing how many people are going to be able to play your game over the entire weekend (way less than you’d think)
• Being prepared for slow internet access on site (way slower than you’d fear) and having your social media scheduled and ready to go in advance.
• Posting to social media early in the morning so people on the way to the show can see it.
• Being the social face of your game – People won’t play if you don’t convince them to play.

So there’s going to be a lot of work to do still in the lead up and over the show. I’m not the most outgoing person and tend to get pretty worn out in social situations, so it’s going to be a challenge for me to be selling our game and drawing people in to play. That’s probably my biggest personal challenge going into PAX.

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And to close off – we were planning to show Level Squared off at the IGDA meetup tonight, but it has ended up being cancelled (for completely understandable reasons). Unfortunately this leaves us without a public play test opportunity.

So we’ll be going along to Get That Game Done at Bar SK this Saturday.

This is going to be our final public play test before PAX, so if you want to check out Level Squared without having to fight the PAX crowds – this is your last chance!

Well we’ve reached that annoying point in the development cycle where the game is pretty much done. If we had to present at PAX tomorrow, I’m confident that we would be able to show off a pretty decent game and that we wouldn’t have any major issues.

However, I’m also confident that there is a whole lot of improvement and polish that can still be packed into the game, and that’s what we are going to be working on for the next four weeks.

And these are all little things, that probably won’t even be really noticeable to anyone playing, but would totally be noticeable if they went wrong, and that are going to make a difference to our presentation on the show floor.

Things like:

• Tweaking all of our UI text to make sure our message is as concise and clear as possible.
• Working on our controls so that our platforming is sharp and smooth to the extent that it’s not even noticed by the player and they can just play and not worry about it.
• Making sure all of our puzzles and levels are as precise and sharp as they can be so that they are frustrating because they are well designed, not because the solution is tricky or mean.

Unfortunately that means I don’t have anything cool to show off on that front for the time being. Sorry.

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What I DO have to show off is our brand new trailer! This has been made for promotional purposes and is supposed to show off all the best aspects of our game, not least our banging soundtrack. Check it out!

 

We’ve also been working to get all of our marketing materials ready for PAX including (but not limited to) T-Shirts, stickers, badges and business cards.

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We’re now moving into the final weeks and our final builds. Going by the timeline for release candidates that I posted about a few weeks ago, today is day -7 to go to the next IGDA Melbourne. And that build is going to be the basis of the build that we take to PAX Australia at the end of the month.

The finish line is in sight!