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!
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.
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!