Hello fellow co-conspirators!
Wow what a couple of weeks! As I mentioned last time, Puppetmaster was going to be presented to the Vancouver game dev community. I was pretty nervous, so I spent the last weeks playtesting fervously and obsessing over every detail that could go wrong. My main fear, of all things, came from the fact it was a strategy game.
See at public presentations, some genres show better than others. Action-packed hack and slash you’re good; soul-searching narrative game, that’ll be rough ; local co-op physics puzzler you shall rule them all!!! A strategy game where players have to sit down and think their next action for several minutes, eeeehhhh no. Seeing a player doing nothing, does not make the game look fun.
I feared that the booth was going to be a ghost town
So, for the last weeks I tried to account for this. I focused on two things: improve the UI so that players aren’t stuck confused in one spot for long, and on the pizzaz, so that players that are walking by can find it interesting.
Through my playtests I knew there was a lot of confusion about the difference between resources. So I changed the UI for the Funds and Intel to look different
I’m not 100% happy with it (lot’s of empty useless space) but it’s a step forward.
I also changed the activation screen. People were confused on how and why you’d lose power when a unit goes from sleeper cell to active. I’m still figuring out how to explain why, but at least I can tell the player it’s going to happen. It went from this:
to this:
Notice the before/after stat panel next to the unit portrait. Not optimal, but getting there.
As for the pizzaz, well…. nothing some stock footage of spies can’t solve:
We don’t see a lot of live footage in games anymore, so it really makes the game stand out. Honestly I quite like it, and I think I’ll lean more into it as the game grows.
How did it go you ask? Yeah….it wen’t really well. The booth was never empty for more than 5 min; I even had to pull some players away to make space for more people! I’m really happy about the reception and it 100% gave me more confidence to keep developing this game. I hope you get to play it (and enjoy it) soon!
Happy conspiring!