I did my first public play test event. This was at Playcrafting here in NYC, at the Microsoft offices. Boy I’ll tell you: play testing is hard, hard, hard. I felt nervous, sweaty and constantly wanted to tell people: “No, you’re playing it wrong!” I wanted to grab the controls from their hands. I also had some pretty serious impostor syndrome, feeling like I didn’t belong there amongst the more finished, more polished games and people with their posters and well organized booths and general having-of-their-shit together. But the event was great. I got some very thoughtful, nice feedback from some of the attendees, many compliments on the visual style of the game (which is a bit surprising since I don’t identify as an ‘artist’ but there you go) along with a good amount of constructive criticism.
The main negative feedback was about the controls. They are hard to use it turns out. That was tough to hear, but also valuable. A few people seemed to get it and after a few minutes of playing got the hang of flying around. Still, I realize that there is some fairly significant work to be done. Getting out and showing the game to people felt really good though, and the deadline was very helpful in getting me to focus and do a bunch of stuff I’d been putting off, some of which was fairly major (like fixing the long broken game over screen). All in all I was very happy with the whole experience and would strongly recommend it to anyone considering it. I also wish I had started getting out and showing it earlier and will chalk that up to a lesson learned. Here are some pictures! I’m the tall guy in the black and white sweater. The last pic is of me and Simon the artist from Mushroom 11 which I got to play and was very impressed with, a super innovative mechanic and generally very interesting (and great looking) game.
