Dev Blog#2.1 — What’s in our Demo
In the previous Dev Blog, we decided on a plan to
Create a small booth, showing our demo and team story.
That’s why our next main objective is to finish our precious game Demo!
Only 1 month left…
At the time we decided on our plan, there was only 1 month left to finish our demo, which is really a short amount of time. Even though it doesn’t contain that much content, but we still need it to be complete enough to make everyone feel comfortable while playing it.
That is why we need to start making our Demo immediately.
And… how much contents will be in the Demo?
The main goal of this Demo is to make people understand what our game is in a really limited amount of time. Due to the Timelie’s complexity and unique gameplay, we need to focus on what we should put in the tutorial. We divided our tutorial into 9 parts
- Controls
- Planning System
- Rewinding Time
- Waiting
- Enemy
- Item
- Dialogue
- Doors
- Game Over
Next, is the step of deciding which tutorial should we put in each stage because learning order is really important.
We must also make sure that players can still enjoy the game while going through each tutorial.
Therefore, we grouped up some of the tutorials that can stay together and here is the result…
- Controls + Planning System
- Waiting
- Enemy + Game Over + Rewinding Time
- Fun Stage
- Doors and Switches (Items)
- Fun Stage
- Fun Stage
- Dialogue System
- Challenging Stage
- Very Challenging Stage!!
The amount of tutorial stages and enjoyable stages look pretty balanced.
Except that… there are 10 stages…
No matter how you think about it, it’s impossible to finish 10 stages in 1 month with a good quality. Only 2 stages per week is already hard enough, and still didn’t count the polishing that needs to be done at the end.
So, without a doubt, we should cut out some stages…
How about having only 5 stages!
- Controls + Planning System
- Waiting
- Enemy + Game Over + Rewinding Time
- Doors and Switches
- Dialogue System
But if we want to keep all the tutorial stages, there won’t be any enjoyable stages left!
Since we only have 5 stages, that means we can only have 3 tutorial stages at maximum.
Then…
How can players understand everything in only 3 tutorial stages?
This was a tough question. We took some time to find a solution for this problem, and during that time, we realized…
We don’t have to teach players “everything”.
Us human beings have a really impressive learning skill even without being taught directly!
Therefore, we decided to remove Rewinding Time tutorial in the 3rd stage because there’s already a Waiting tutorial in the 2nd stage. If you know how to move the clock forward, then by common sense, you should also know how to move it backward.
Door and Dialogue System tutorial is also not necessary and could be understood if we can show them clearly enough.
so…
- Controls + Planning System
- Waiting
- Enemy + Game Over
- Dialogue System+ Door + Fun Stage (Only showing not teaching)
- Challenging stage
At this certain point, we only have a little time left so we must finalize our plan and stick with these 5 stages then start working on the project.
After that, we spend all days and nights working on the Demo…
Until the last day before the event
Those who have used Unity3D before must know that Unity’s default Optimization System is really good… soooooo very very good that we wanted to create our own. (haha)
That is where the problem comes in…
The devices that we had for the event was 2 of iPad Mini 2nd Generation…
and when an unoptimized game meet an old device the result is
A super extreme LAG (about 10 fps)
Luckily, at the end of the day, we found 1 more iPad 4th Generation which came to rescue us at the last minute.
Finally, Timelie:Omen Demo was finished!
and built to that iPad 4 only a few hours before the event. (haha)
And now, we finally arrived at the day of the event that we have always been looking forward to. We had no idea how good (or bad) our game was gonna be because there was so little time for us to test anything.
Well, we just have to deal with it and proceed to the Chula Expo and NITAD17!
Next time, you will get to know what we experienced during those 5 days of the event. Don’t forget to come back and check it out later. :D
