ECCC Report: Dead Winter, Glyphsong; Demos!! (Patreon)

 GAME DEMOS AND MUSIC SOUNDTRACK: Since we've expanded our game demos to support Windows, Mac and Linux, files have exceeded Patreon's 200mb attachment limit. Here is a Google Drive containing our current ECCC game demo builds for Dead Winter and Glyphsong, as well as a music soundtrack by Jason: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B5QcDfP8aojOeEl6ZlpSMGE2REk 

To thank all our patrons for putting up with February's game-only crunch month we'll have this post available for all patrons, not just games ones. The games should run on any computer, feel free to contact either myself or Jason either here or on Twitter or wherever else with any feedback you may have!  Thanks for sticking with us.

Today's post-con writeup is from Jason: 

With ECCC 2017 in our rearview mirror, we learned a lot, just like we do every con where we’ve brought a game. This time, we brought two! On top of that, we had a very unique product at the convention, a USB drive that could be drawn on, allowing us to share all comics, music, and game demos for the same price that a normal sketch card might be. In fact, we’ll be linking some of the contents of the drive for patrons, including game demos for Dead Winter and Glyphsong, and some of Glyphsong’s soundtrack.

Patrons are no doubt aware of Dead Winter, our 4-player brawler with zombies in your way. The version we’re going to share is our ground-up rework in the new Godot engine, which we scrambled to build in roughly one month. It’s more capable and has more potential to grow into a home version—and also has more potential for bugs. This first one, you’ll get in all its buggy glory, which fortunately is mostly in multiplayer modes.

The second game, Glyphsong, is a wholly different concept. It’s a musical puzzle game, meant for mobile/tablet deployment in app stores. The idea is that it’s a low-impact game, not hard to code and not hard to create assets for in a short timeframe. It’s grown from that idea into a larger beast, as we’ve iterated on the design. The focus in it is definitely on the music, as well as acting as a parallel for how one might learn how to cast magic, since learning and practicing musical concepts is possibly not that different…

We had both games set up at our table, and after we worked through the other quirks of the convention, we started observing some trends for both games, and what we’ll need to adjust for next time.

1) The Pause-and-Run

More than previous conventions, we had people come to play Dead Winter, with no interest in actually finishing our demo. Which is okay! It doesn’t hurt our feelings when it happens, and everyone has a lot of stuff to see and do at a convention. But, it was happening so often that often we’d not notice, and then the game was just sitting in a paused state until someone else would want to play, but not know what to do.

The solution is straightforward, where any place that a player could leave the game stranded would time out and return to a start screen after some set time, such as thirty seconds. The pause screen as well as if a player just idles during the level for an amount of time would both need something. Even Glyphsong could use that, as players in the middle of a puzzle may give up and move on. But we have to be cautious: we have to make sure the game demo features don’t cause a problem for the version we would want to send out for others.

2) Bugs Just Happen

In the C++ version of Dead Winter, we had a lot of control over the result, at the expense of time. It took a lot of effort to build up the game in pure code (conversely, we recreated a year’s worth of work in about a month in the new engine), but in that time we figured out how to crush most of the glaring bugs we had worked through. This time though? Not so much. Working in an engine means all new problems can arise, and people trying the game were going to discover them. There was multiple instances of players ending up out of bounds during multiplayer, something that had been under-tested in our scramble for readiness.

The nice thing, however, is that the players didn’t really care. There’s an expectation that a game in development won’t be fully functional, we’re just showing off something that was in store for the future. Now, we did have the dev laptop with us throughout the con, but even with bugs, people could usually finish the level, so it wasn’t ever critical to fix on the spot.

Glyphsong wasn’t bug-free either. During one of the first tests, a fellow gamedev (because of course) was confused as to what the challenge in the game actually was. It turns out there was none, because all the symbols that are supposed to be hidden and slowly or strategically revealed were all visible. Whoops. That one we did have to do a dev tweak on to clean up, since it wasn’t really a game at that point.

3) Integrated Tutorial

This one mostly applies to Glyphsong, as we already had our sort of tutorial worked out for Dead Winter: press X a bunch, that’s enough for the average game to get it. Glyphsong is not as readily obvious to understand, and the tutorial itself was a bit bloated and hard to absorb the info. When players finally reached level 1, therefore, they’d already forgotten key features of the game, like what it meant if the symbols on a button turned dark, or that they could use energy built up from playing correct notes to reveal more of the symbols on the puzzle itself.

The learning part and the fun part were separated, and lacking one made the other more difficult. People who figured out the system seemed to enjoy it, but players were often puzzled, and likely that impacted their impression. Knowing what the players struggled gave me a plan for the future builds, where the overall tutorial would be slimmed down and instead there would be tooltips during the first few levels to teach the player while they’re engaged. With fifty levels planned, there’s plenty of room for the first few to be more like a tutorial anyway.

4) Controllers Catch the Eye

Probably my favorite story from all the times we’ve shown off games is that at Topatocon, an older woman caught eye of our booth, but not for any reasons we would have expected. She walked over, and immediately fixated on the Xbox controllers we had for the game demo, picking up one of the clear controllers, exclaiming “These are beautiful! Did you make these? They belong in a jewelry store!”

In a way, though, she demonstrated a phenomenon that happens a lot: people walking by the table pick up on the controllers long before they realize we have a game demo. Especially young kids, they gravitate to the controllers and pick them up, never even looking at the screen as they do so, until their parents yank them away. Once the controller is in someone’s hands, they’re happy to push some buttons and whack some zombies, even when they tell us that they exclusively play Call of Duty and are so good at it.

We never really had to tell people that Dead Winter was a game, so we talked about other things. This was different for Glyphsong, where we didn’t talk much about it and it didn’t have controllers attached, so people left it alone. It was sort of an anomaly on the table, even though it had the word “PLAY” highlighted on the screen. In the future, we have to make it clear up-front that it was a game and was meant to be played, since without something that clearly indicated its purpose, it was ignored.

5) Send ‘em Home

Even though the games are far from ready, people would still ask if the game was out and where they could buy it, if it was on Steam or console or wherever. In the past, we just had to say that it was on the way, but there was no way to keep playing and testing back then. With our USB sketch drives, however, it opened things up! We had a way we could send the game home with people who wanted to support our efforts, as well as other bonus stuff. It added an extra dimension to the table when some people were only interested in the games and probably wouldn’t have purchased a book, but they’d spring for a sketch drive.

There are of course risks inherent in this method: the buyer has to trust that we’re not sending home malicious code to infect their computer, and we had to trust that buyers didn’t intend to reverse-engineer our code and undermine our development efforts. Most liked the idea of the sketch drive though, and we were happy to take a risk if it meant being able to show off our efforts in a tiny package. What it really showed, though, is that people appreciated us trying something unique, and since we don’t have the same sort of budget or resources of a game studio, every little bit helps.

Anyway, we will keep pressing on crush bugs, add content, and soon, sell what we’ve made. For now, though, enjoy what we’ve already built! More will be on the way in the near future.