Dev Blog #2.2 — Nitad is here!

Last time, I already talked about the steps of making the Demo and it was finished (at the last minute).

Now it’s time for our guests to try it.

On the final night before the event, I was working really hard to make sure that everything is ready while everyone went to prepare other stuff for the booth.

After the game was built to the iPads the we prepared, then we set them at the booth next morning, waiting for our guests to come and try our demo.

While I was waiting… my thoughts went pretty wild, and thought that “Is it good enough? Will they enjoy it? What if they don’t like it?”

Then… It’s time for the event to start!

My thoughts only went so far when the event started and people started coming in to the building, then to our booth and started to play our demo.

During these times, I stayed around to see the reactions and feedback from everyone that got to try our demo.

And when they completed it, I went ahead and ask some more questions to gather more opinions that could help improving our game in the future.

It was better than I expected. I feared that there will be a lot of complaints but, instead, people really enjoy playing the demo.

“It was really fun!”

“When is it going to be launched? I will definitely buy it!”

These words really made us feel happy and gave us more strength to keep doing our work. I couldn’t stop smiling. (haha)

Improvements…

Most of the events are pretty much the same. People come to play our game, then they gave us feedback and maybe took some pictures with us.

But every end of the day, we read through all the comments that we got in each day and start improving as much as we can during the night.

Here are some of the problems that we’ve fixed and some improvements during these 5 days.

Problem#1: Stage 1 is too plain and Player didn’t know how to use items

There are actually 2 problems in this one.

The first stage introduces controls to the player, by letting player controls the character to the exit and nothing else, which most people thought that it was too simple.

Another thing is that player didn’t know how to use items in other stages. For example: when players see a switch, they didn’t know how to interact with it.

Fix: We decided to fix these 2 problems together by adding an item in to the first stage, which is a switch and a door. This makes stage 1 a little less simple and also introduce items to the player at the same time.

Problem#2: No tutorial for time manipulation

The new time manipulation system that replaced the old “Timeline” is the new “Timewheel” (which is actually a clock).

We made the Timewheel looks very intuitive so that players can use it without being taught, but we wasn’t so sure and wanted to test it in this event.

As expected, most people didn’t know how to use it.

Fix: After the first day, we added a finger rotating around the Timewheel as a tutorial for it, and the next day, the problem is gone. As simple as that.

Problem#3: It wasn’t clear that time also moves forward with every action

Due to low details in graphics (because it is only a demo), almost everything in the stage is stationary even when the time is moving forward, which caused the player to think that time was frozen.

Fix: We added more objects that are always moving into each stage.

Problem#4: Not enough devices

This wasn’t a feedback from our players, but it was very clear that there was a lot of people waiting to play our game and ended up waiting too long, then decided to go somewhere else.

Fix: I realized that we still have our iPad mini s that we didn’t get to use them yet. However, the game was too laggy to be played in the iPad mini.

The method that I used to solved this problem was to limit the game’s resolution based on which device the game is running on. If it’s iPad mini, then limit the resolution to about 70%. Problem solved!

Limiting the resolution is okay because most 3D games don’t need that high of a resolution, especially with retina displays. You would barely see the difference between 100% and 70% resolution, but the performance is increased dramatically.

And now, we got 2 more devices to use! yay.

Problem#5: Timewheel is too big

At first, Timewheel was at the top middle of the screen, and it will expand to the middle when being used and will cover almost everything on the screen. (haha)

This was one of my stupid mistakes that I, somehow, though it’s gonna be okay…

well, it was definitely not okay.

Fix: Just shrink and move it to the lower right corner.

Done. :D

We did all the improvements during the night between each day and it was really tiring, but definitely worth it because having to deal with the same problem in the next day would be so much pain and we would waste that time that we could have got more feedback.

And that’s it! The Nitad event finished peacefully.

We have learned so many things from this event, such as how much we didn’t know about our players. Another thing is we got to know how much people enjoy our game and we received really warm cheers from everyone.

After this we will really focus on completing the game. It might take a while but please continue supporting us.

Thank you all for reading!

Peace. :D