PAX West 2016, and What’s Next
Hey everyone, we thought it’d be a good time to give an update of where the project is heading. It’s been about two weeks since PAX West, so we’ll go over what happened there and what we learned.
If you didn’t already know, we had a booth at PAX West in Seattle in the VR Village. It was our first event since this project’s inception, and it went pretty well! Although we had some technical issues in the beginning getting set up (the curtains given by the management were too thin, so there was a lot of IR interference between booths), we had many people try the game through the convention.
We had two stations for people to try the game and conducted surveys. As for the game itself, we decided to simply go forward and present a pre-alpha build. There wasn’t a tutorial for the controls so we taught each player on the spot. The gesture system was slightly buggy as well, though seemed to operate fine for most people. We simply had players kill a couple of archers, as there was no concrete objective in the game at the time.
We received approximately 200 responses to our survey. Many of the attendees also took time out to talk to us about the direction of the game, which proved to be invaluable.
What We Learned: A Look at the Surveys
Exposure is definitely an important part of why we attended PAX, but our main reason was to get feedback from regular players. We find that as developers we don’t always see obvious issues with the game, so player feedback is highly relevant and important.
Overall Impressions: In terms of the gameplay and gesture-controls, we received overwhelmingly positive responses from everyone. The direction we’re taking the game and the controls seems to be good, so we need to iron out some kinks and add more content and things to do. The pre-alpha we showed was a good concept and fun, but overall lacking as a game
Most everyone found the gesture controls to be a natural way of doing things, which is great. The controls were unresponsive at times however; fixing that is currently a top priority. Expect an updated version the next time we are at a convention.
Something that was particularly popular was the “force pull.” Players could summon multiple rocks and then have them follow their hands. This led to players having rocks orbiting them at high speeds, allowing them to knock down foes with a barrage of boulders. Players could also punch a rock and then have it fly back to them in a slingshot fashion.
Teaching gestures isn’t easy: The game desperately needs a good tutorial system. Although we were attempting to teach players the controls, some would flail around summoning at random. A robust, in-game tutorial that makes everything clear is important, especially with the control scheme we are using. However, teaching gestures without a person physically there may prove difficult. We have a couple ideas in mind.
One of the biggest and most frustrating issues was aiming rocks. When players punched rocks, they would fly in wild directions. According to the survey results, the most sought after improvement was aiming as players would punch straight but the rock would go flying in a particular direction. Although we couldn’t pinpoint and fix this during the convention, we’ve finally identified the source of the bad aim. It should be a lot better in our next build of the game!
Other Thoughts: In terms of music and art, players really enjoyed the environment and music that played during combat. Players felt immersed into the environment, and the music put players into the right mood. A big shout out to our artists and musicians!
Our pre-alpha build was a short and simple single player experience. We received a lot of requests asking for multiplayer. Fortunately, one of our plans is indeed to bring multiplayer to the game, after we flesh out the controls, elemental manipulation, and other basic gameplay elements.
Moving Forward
We currently don’t plan on attending more conventions just yet, though it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Right now, we want to focus more on the game itself, so we’re going to be hard at work for the next few months. We want to hammer out a good demo experience, packed with a tutorial, improved controls, and a complete single player experience. Presently, we are going to be fully developing the earth element first, and then move on to develop fire, water, and air later.
Our top priorities are to improve the responsiveness of the gesture controls (a core component of our game) and to have a more fulfilling single player experience that isn’t “here, kill some archers.” Look forward to seeing more updates of where we are taking the game in the future. If you have any suggestions or ideas, feel free to shoot us a message!
-More Equal Studios Team
Side note: You may have noticed we now refer to the project as “Project Aether” instead of “Project Earth Shaker.” We found that “aether” encompasses all the elements, which is more of our intention for the final game. We’ll release the final name of the game in the future, but for now, please look out for updates on Project Aether!
