Apologies for the Delay

Hello again! Yes, it's certainly been a while. As I should have possibly foreseen, the other parts of my course that I was moaning about rather a while ago suddenly started becoming actually important meaning less time was dedicated to the game. This alongside problems with my student bank account and a trip to the Explay event in Bath mean my progress with my game has been somewhat lackadaisical of late, but no more!

In terms of development, things have been going pretty well with the game, I have what is pretty much a fully playable demo ready, with a fail state and restart buttons and everything! So after a pretty good tutorial session (those have picked up as well) with some of the CGD staff, I got a lot of feedback on how getting some playtesting going would be a good idea. So, being the conscientious man that I am, I went ahead and created a little facebook group of a few close friends (brutally honest close friends, at that), gave them the .swf of my game and a link to a google form for feedback and let them loose.

Needless to say, this was fantastic advice. The bug reports that I got were almost all things I had missed during playtesting, and I was given some suggestions that I hadn't really thought about before, or that reinforced feelings I had about the game mechanic already. So as of this morning I've set to work fixing those bits, with the intention of releasing a second demo for the same group, to see what they think.

But that's not my only plan! I know that contracting a load of people you already know is not the best way to play test a game, so I want to get this out to a wider audience. Just how? I'm not sure yet, but there's a whole load of pin boards around the university with space on, so I was thinking of perhaps finding a bit of free, online file hosting space and posting up the address of the file and the form, hopefully catching some random members of the public, getting some good feedback and maybe spreading a bit of hype for the game? (Hmmm)


So yes, that's the plan of action, the previous events and the crap excuses out of the way, hopefully I should be able to post a few screenshots of the game looking a bit more polished soon. Until then, see you next time!