Pre-EAE Day Jitters

I have unfortunately been sick for the past few days, so I missed out on our last chance to show the instructors our game in an up-close fashion.  From what I heard, they loved it and they were able to easily play through the few tutorial levels we have - somewhat proving to us that an inexperienced player (or maybe an overly critical one :D) can follow what we have set up without too many issues.

The funny thing is that we are starting to realize that people like to do things that have no bearing on the game state.  We are constantly thinking of ways we can set up challenges for people and see if they can complete them.  But every time we show somebody new they want to just mess around with our mechanics and get nothing done.  So, it is definitely a design angle that is quickly approaching that we hadn't really thought of before.

As far as finding challenges and things for people to do, we are definitely not short on that.  The plan for the demo day is roughly 9 levels, 6 of them being tutorial levels and 3 being more challenging ones that assume the players already went through the tutorials.

There is an interesting debate going on internally whether people will want to play our game for more than 5 minutes.  I have been saying that if people like the mechanics then they will continue to play for as long as you can keep them entertained.  I think too many people are stuck in the student game mindset and associating their school work to a flash game on a website rather than making a fully fleshed-out game that has a more significant presence and lifespan in the mind of a gamer.

I'd say we can safely expect about 20 minutes of content for an average player at EAE Day, so it should be interesting to see who was right about that ;)

Oh man, there is so much that has been done that I can recall back to, but if I could sit down and talk about it for a really long time then the post would be INSANELY long.  Maybe I will do that another time.  For now, we just need to focus on our demo day.