The Summer festival is over and here are some changes based on things I saw and learned.

Keep it short

I think the demo was too long and took too long to get to the more interesting stuff. I lost about half of the people that tried the demo before they even got to the gum. It's a tricky balance with those early levels teaching important concepts but not being as interesting. They're really tutorials disguised as the regular game. The demo included levels that were disabled, where you could jump in a portal to progress past the level. I thought it would be fun to tease those, but they just kind of broke the flow and confused some people. There was also a hub level where you had to deposit keys found at the end of other levels, which wasn't really necessary for the demo. With that, I trimmed out a bunch of unnecessary stuff:

• A few less important or less fun levels
• The disabled levels
• The Key Sockets hub level
• All the key gems, since there's nowhere to use them now

I also got rid of the branching and just made the flow completely linear.

I also added a new level that really ties the game together at the end.

Self Destruction

The self destruct station turned out to not be as intuitive as I thought. It had too many functions depending on what was going on at the time the button was pressed. Press it before any Nummels spawned and they would start coming out right away. Press it while any Nummels were in play and they all explode. Press it after they're all done and you explode.
I liked that there was a way to start Nummels spawning early to beat the par time, so I made a new button that only does just that.
Now the self destruct station only appears in levels where some of the Nummels can get stuck, and the start button is in all the levels.

Gum Confusion

The gum introduction level wasn't doing it's job. It was possible to beat the level without ever having a Nummel touch the gum. When the Nummel did chew the gum and block the others, people didn't know what to do and would sometimes think they messed up and then self destruct the whole thing. I overestimated how much of a clue the space above the gum was that you need to jump on them.
Much better. Now they have to use the gum, and there's a little sign to tell you to jump on them to spit out the gum.

Festival Thoughts

The festival did a few things for me. Since it was only for games that are releasing before Summer of next year, it gave me a reason to set a release date. I've been picking away at this project in my spare time for many years, and not having a deadline meant that I would probably just keep picking at it forever. So now I have some motivation to just get the thing done and put it out there. It was fun to get some hands on the game and start collecting some wishlists. My numbers weren't anything amazing, but it was sure better than not participating. I visited Twitch last weekend and asked a few streamers who were playing demos in the festival to give it a try. These were streamers with 10-50 viewers, and they were mostly very happy to check it out. Chatting with their viewers while the streamer played the game was the most fun part of the festival for me, and I saw a significant bump in my wishlists on those days. The demo was only supposed to be live during the festival. There were some issues with the automated activation of all the demos at the start of the festival, so I had to manually activate the demo, and then it was up to me to also deactivate the demo at the end of the festival. I've decided to just leave it up for now.

Leaderboard Breaking Update

The changes in this update invalidate the leaderboards, so those are all reset for the new version. You can still go back and play/look at the old leaderboards by selecting a beta branch on the demo properties in your Steam library. That's all for now, have a great day!

[ 2020-06-28 01:04:49 CET ] [ Original post ]