On May 21st, we presented Breaking Fast at BayDevs, an event held within Retromiranda for showcasing indie games. The event was a great opportunity to gather more feedback and, even more importantly, to get to know other fantastic national indie development studios, in particular, Sons of a Bit, Calcifer Games and MoreThanGamers.
The former presented its game Isla Bomba, a puzzle platformer with lots of levels in which you have to throw bombs in the water before they explode. For this purpose, you need to combine the abilities of different animals. The game features very nice and polished 3D environments and models in the lines of the last titles of Donkey Kong, together with a fun and engaging gameplay.
As for Calcifer Games, they presented a game called U.F.O. RISE, in which you have to guide an inoffensive alien through a stage in which enemies (furious farmers) spawn continuously. The goal is to gather pieces of its broken spaceship and your only weapon is your ability to turn your enemies into allies so they can fight for you.
Finally, MoreThanGamers presented Crazy Princess, a challenging game where you play the role of a charming prince who is pursued relentlessly by princesses who want to marry him desperately. The game starts out simple, but soon it becomes an interesting challenge because the girls are quite tough and fast.
The participating studios also had the opportunity to give a talk about their studios and their games. In the next video, you can watch part of my talk (in Spanish).
As for Breaking Fast, we are very happy with the feedback received from the organizers and from the attendants. In the next video, you can watch two kids enjoying the game:
Also, we were interviewed for Ruta Gamer, a podcast about videogames hosted by the Catholic University of Murcia. You can listen to us from minute 25.
Finally, we had the chance to visit Cartagena, a really beautiful town with dozens of historical monuments and ruins. That fabulous Roman theater...
On Sunday, the day after the event, we could even enjoy a day of beach and sun, shellfish and fried fish :).
Hope you have enjoyed reading about our adventure in Cartagena.
As many of you probably know, we were presenting our game Breaking Fast during PAX East 2016. It has been the first time that we have attended this event, and it has been actually the first time that we have shown Breaking Fast in any game event and in front of such a huge game audience. Without further ado, I am going to summarize our experience during PAX.
Pre-PAX story
Back in the end of February, we were considering whether it would be feasible to attend this event. By that time, the game was in a very raw state, but we did want to take advantage of any opportunity to promote the game, so I filled out the contact form that was available on the PAX website, 'just in case', I told to myself. Some time later, a PAX sales manager contacted us via e-mail to request more information about the game. We sent him what we had at that time: a brief description of the game, a link to our website, and a video where the game was succinctly introduced, shown below.
Some time later, he responded that the game seemed really fun, and he encouraged us to contact him again when we had something more solid. In an outburst of optimism, we told him that we would reach out to him again in two weeks with a playable demo of the game. Of course, we understimated the effort that this goal would entail.
After a month of intense work, by the beginning of April, we had the demo and we had recorded some new gameplay videos in which some friends were playing the game. We had lost our hope to attend PAX because the event would take place in just three weeks. Since I wanted to keep the contact with the sales manager, and also with a view to have some chance for next year, we sent him the demo and the new gameplay video. A big surprise arrived in the form of a reply to our e-mail: "Awesome! I have a 10x10 available at East for you guys if you’re still interested in exhibiting. I know the show is coming up fast.".
At that point, we were a bit in shock, because we really had lost all hope to attend the event, and now we had to decide quickly whether we wanted to make a sudden moderately high investment. Of course, as you may have followed our tweets and Facebook posts, you know that we took the offer.
In two weeks, we had to make all the arrangements. Fortunately, flying to Boston is not too expensive (not at least as expensive as New York), and we found a good offer for a really nice hotel, which turned out to be excellent. However, we still needed to make lots of preparations for the event, including all the material that we would be taking: tee-shirts, posters, x-banner, business cards, flyers, and plenty of electronic devices that we could not afford hiring there. As you can guess, our luggage was kind of heavy...
As part of the registration in PAX, we received a huge list with press contacts that would attend the event. We attempted to reach as many as these contacts as we could, although we knew that it would be difficult to make appointments with such a short antipication. In fact, we only received around 8 replies to the burst of e-mails that we sent.
And of course, and more importantly, we needed to polish the game and we wanted to add more characters. Actually, Manuela (the artist) sketched and designed the bacon during our flight connection in London, and it was the most popular among all the characters!
Bacon, the popular!
During PAX
For those of you who have had the chance to attend PAX, you surely know that it comprises a huge expo floor. We were really amazed while admiring the stands that big companies were setting up upon our arrival.
The set-up of the booth was smooth, except for an unfortunate setback: we had taken three PC screens with the idea of using one of them for looping a teaser of the game, and the other two for playing. However, one of the PC screens had apparently suffered a stroke during the flight and was broken. I was a bit irritated, but fortunately, we realized this on Thursday evening, not too late, and we had some time to buy a new one, which was cheaper than it is here in Spain, and which was better; every cloud has a silver lining.
Breaking Fast Teaser
Our general experience during PAX was great, with lots of people willing to play our game and to rate it as "very fun" or "addictive". Some of them were certain that the game would be a hit and were disappointed to know that the game was not available yet. We collected as many e-mails of potentially interested buyers as we could.
There is an important issue that we overlooked at first but that we fortunately corrected soon: the booth distribution. On the first day, Friday, the booth was organized with the table perpendicular to the surface, as you can see below.
Original booth distribution
This seemingly normal distribution turned out to be a psychological barrier for many people who were curious about the game but were reluctant to "come into" the booth to try it. Changing the distribution in such a way that the game was available to any passer-by made a big impact: even when on Friday lots of people played the game, on Saturday and Sunday (days on which we had already changed the distribution) there were peak moments with people linining up to play and watching how others played. This was an important lesson for us: make as easy as possible for players to play your game; don't assume that people who want to play the game will actually do it if they have to engage in a close relationship or a conversation.
Changed distribution: passers-by could play directly the game without entering the booth
As a final note to my PAX experience, I want to boast about something: I could introduce myself and talk a little bit with Ron Gilbert, the creator of a masterpiece known as Monkey Island. He was there presenting his own game called Thimbleweed Park, which is really promising, especially for those lovers of old-school adventure games.
Post-PAX, now what?
Watching hundreds of people playing your game provides an invaluable feedback and you get a good sense of what people like the most and the least. We intend to release the game by the end of summer, and therefore we still have time to improve over the weaker points of the game and to polish the stronger ones.
There are other events coming up and we plan to present the game there; these events include Retromiranda Baydevs, Mallorca Game, and Gamepolis, although we do not discard attending other international events. In the end, we are just seeking the biggest possible feedback as well as to raise awareness of the game so that potentially interested people learn about it before the release.
If you have any specific question about our experience in PAX, do not hesitate to leave a comment.
How are you doing? We continue working hard on Breaking Fast to make it the best game you've ever played in you life! ...
Last week we had a couple of testing sessions with people external to the development team, and these sessions were quite eye-opening in two senses: first, it allowed us discovering some bugs, which is the tradional goal of testing; but second and more importantly, we noticed that some design aspects were misleading, and others that we didn't consider so important were actually key to the players.
In this post, I intend to emphasize the importance of this early feedback and to summarize the most important changes that we applied as a result of this feedback. You may think that some of the changes are subtle, but sometimes a subtle change may cause a major impact on the overall gaming experience. You may also think that some changes were obviously required, but here's the key to external feedback: once you're very focused on your project, it's easy to lose pespective and you need someone to shove you back so that you can see the complete image instead of the individual pixel.
Why is early feedback that important? In addition to the loss of perspective reason, obtaining feedback may help you not diverting too much from your original goal. Usually, people ask you what your game is about, and you can compare your answer with the impressions that people get when they play your game. If you see they don't match, you can take actions quickly.
Also, it is a well-known principle for software engineers that the difficulty in performing changes on software increases as the development moves forward. This is known as the cost curve, first proposed by Boehm. Therefore, early feedback may result in cheaper development changes.
And how did we change Breaking Fast as a result of the early feedback? Here we go with a summary of the most relevant changes:
Position must be always visible: at first, we decided that showing the distance covered by each player was enough. However, thanks to the feedback, it became clear that players expect to see their positions continously. Therefore, we added an element in the HUD to show this information. Still, we need to sort out how to show the relative position with each other player and the distance among players. But now we are sure that this is a problem that is worth the effort.
Throwing stuff is cool: in Breaking Fast, there are two types of boosters; those that activate an attack as soon as they are picked, and others that require the players to throw something explicitly. In our testing session we understood that players felt more rewarded when they could throw somehting they had picked. Therefore, a booster that originally was designed to be activated automatically was re-designed to be thrown.
Physical attacks must stand out: characters in Breaking Fast can attack each other physically. This is a cool and fun mechanic, but players of the testing session agreed that the animations should stand out more, especially because characters in 3 players or 4 players races are small. So we decided to exagerate the animation.
Players want to know that the race is ending: in several races there were a couple of players that didn't realize that the race had ended and felt frustrated because they could not control the character anymore. We have solved this by a) adding an alarm that is triggered when there are 10 seconds remaining; b) by showing these 10 seconds bigger on the screen; c) and by accompanying each of the last 10 seconds with an audible tick sound.
Beginning of the race: we designed the beginning of the race in such a way that players had to press the movement key/button only when the initial countdown had gone to zero; otherwise, characters wouldn't move until they pressed the buttons again. This initial idea was implemented in order to require more precision from the players, but it turned out to give the impression that their controls didn't work, and it wasn't that fun anyway, so we discarded it.
Turbo was a big advantage: characters in Breaking Fast can activate their turbo upon some conditions. However, the original design made the turbo too advantageous for those meeting those conditions and mastering the controls. We therefore redesigned this mechanic to make it harder to exploit.
Bugs detection: of course, we found some bugs that fortunately could be quickly fixed, but we wouldn't have been aware of them hadn't been for the testing session with several players doing lots of stuff concurrently.
And this is it! I hope you're more conviced (if you weren't) to test your game and to retrieve early feedback as soon as possible. In the end, it's in your best interest and will save you development time.
