When I first came across one of these videos, I couldn't believe it was for real. But yes. Apparently it is, indeed, a "thing." There's thousands of them. There are even several Let's Plays of my own games out there (and a special shout out must go to Resulka, who I think has Let's Played my entire catalog), which pleases me to no end.
Eventually it got into my head to try doing a Let's Play of my own, but instead of playing any random game I decided to play a game that I developed myself.
I chose Emerald City Confidential because, of all my games, I probably have the most to say about it. It has an interesting genesis. PlayFirst (a casual game developer) approached me (a old school point-and-click developer) to make a game for them. Their goal? To make a point-and-click style game for the casual audience. We came from two totally different mindsets, and the road to finishing this game was an interesting one to say the least.
Anyway, here's the first episode. In this first episode, we learn how to pick up and use a crowbar, why dialog options can be intimidating, and the story behind the quest gems.
(If the video is too small, click the "YouTube" button on the lower right to zap yourself to YouTube")
Please let me know in the comments if you find these interesting! I'll probably do more.
-Dave
I want to say how informative it was to hear you talk about your design decisions in light of your market research. It was more than just a little painful to watch the lengths you have to go to for casual gamers to "get it", but I must stress it was a good kind of pain. Like, going to the gym pain -I'm better for it! Keep it up.
ReplyDeleteI found the detailed info about Emerald's testers very scary (even though I already heard some stories).
ReplyDeleteThe thing is it seems like the key testers (representing the core audience) are interested in playing the game and wanting to have fun with it, but at the same time they are almost completely uninterested to put any effort into understanding what is going on in it.
I imagine designing for such an audience is like those terrible dreams where you try to explain something important to someone, but everything that comes out of your mouth becomes gibberish and no one can figure out what you mean.
An excellent idea. Bravo monsieur!
ReplyDeleteIgor: Pretty much, yes! It's easy to get bitter about it, but the reality was that we were designing for an entirely different market than I was used to. The folks at PF loved the game, but when we started testing and saw that we were losing the casual audience, we went into panic mode. All sorts of last-minute changes were made to the core design (like those quest gems, among other things). I'll be talking more about them in future episodes. The second episode is up, incidentally!
ReplyDelete-Dave
Thanks. Very interesting and informative.
ReplyDeleteThis is indeed great Developer's Commentary. I could see using it as an excuse to replay ECC if you had embedded this into the game like Valve has been doing lately. (If you haven't seen it, their games such as Portal 2 have an unlockable Developer's Commentary mode where interesting discussions about a part of the game can be found as interactable nodes in the game. The Special Edition of LeChuck's Revenge had a similar feature.)
ReplyDeleteOh yeah. I *love* commentaries. I often put dev commentaries in my games (Blackwell, Shivah and Gemini Rue all have them), but I couldn't convince PlayFirst to let me do one for ECC. So I'm doing it this way!
ReplyDelete