EAE Day is officially over!

What an interesting experience EAE Day was.  I'm not really sure what I expected because it was pure chaos getting everything put together at the last minute (and still wasn't quite what we wanted to show).

There was a funny dynamic to when we were prepping for EAE Day that proved to work out better than we had intended.  We didn't know what kind of traffic or attention our game would get, so we had planned on putting a trailer in the game that would run if the main menu was idle for long enough.  So, I made the trailer and another video in a couple of hours and it was all ready to roll, except we forgot to implement it!

The good news is that despite forgetting, our stations were constantly occupied and people were playing for a long time (basically playing everything that we had to offer in most circumstances, unless they were a student/instructor that wanted to see everything).  I don't know if there ever was time for people to have seen the trailer anyway, because as soon as somebody left a station, there was already another person waiting to take their place.

The very interesting thing about watching people play our game (especially people that have never heard of it before) is that I saw people getting stuck on some parts, yet it wasn't enough of a hindrance for them to stop playing.  They would continually die on the same parts over and over, but found our game interesting to want to push through it and win.  I think I only saw a couple of people that got to a harder or more unorganized part and it actually turned them away.

Another big issue was that we were talking about changing the controls for a long time, and what we demoed was some kind of weird double and single-stick hybrid (it was proposed and implemented by me so I can use whatever adjectives I want to criticize it).  It accomplished most of what people wanted to do, but it also forced them to have to switch all the time between the two.  Still, like I said, they didn't seem to mind despite me being able to see them fumbling with the controls at certain parts.

The biggest and most important component of our game, I think, is that we could sit somebody down, they could put headphones on and play the game without asking questions or needing us to explain what to do.  We were very worried about that and we saw a lot of over-explaining going on during the demo day at other stations, so I take that as an overwhelming positive that our mechanics are good and people can understand them if we teach them the right way (this being a direct response to a post a few weeks ago about our game being too complicated and getting kind of trashed by an industry member that played our game).  I think if you ever have to take more than a few sentences to explain your game to somebody then it will definitely not work out in the long run.

I have so much to say about all of the stuff we experienced during the semester, and I think I will do that in the next couple of days.  So if you want a "lessons learned" post that talks all about EVERYTHING we did during the semester, it's on the way.