Utah Indie Night - Spring 2007
We had another awesome indie game developer night tonight at Wahoo Studios. Or at least I thought it was awesome. I was in my own little world most of the time. Again.

We had just under 30 people show up, lots of pizza and munchies, and several games making their showing. We had some guys (Mike and Victor) demonstrate their XNA game on the XBox. John Olsen demonstrated his completely revised, new-and-improved XNA version of Fish School. And one of our number did an emulator (I think?) in XNA (so you could play Nintendo games on the XBox, if you had their ROM image... how bizarre is that?) I cannot confirm or deny that one though... I could have heard wrong.

I got into a few good discussions with folks, got to grouse a bit about portals and Torque and stuff (yes, I grouse about it, even though I use it. The engine is crazy feature-rich for costing practically nothing, but it's still got its warts and frustration). And while I was at it, since I have just recently (like, this week) been assigned to working on the graphics pipeline on a Wii title we've got in late development, I was able to pick up some optimization tips from another full-time game programmer on Nintendo Wii graphics programming. How's that for the benefits of networking?

Mostly, I watched people play Apocalypse Cow. And took copious notes. Well, maybe not copious. But I was writing fervently while still trying to watch people play. There's something about watching someone play your game that just can't be reproduced any other way. Any time you have to explain something, or you have to answer a question, or you can see them doing something "wrong," (or at least something wrong that will lead them to having less fun), or see them get bored / frustrated, you've got an action item. AND you get some great verbal feedback on what they liked and didn't like that you wouldn't get if they had to take the time to write it out to you in a report.

So though I missed much of what was going on tonight, the night was a huge success for me!

Want to hear some of what I got on my list? Of course you don't! It reads like a grocery list. But in the spirit of my Frayed Knights discussions, I'm going to some of it with you anyway, because this is my blog and I can be dry if I want to.

* Upgrade Dialog: It's not clear to people that it allows you to buy stuff here. It looks more like a report of battle stats. Also, the cost for each upgrade should be labeled "cost"
* Upgrade Dialog: The upgrade buttons need to have a disabled state for things too expensive to upgrade, and need to appear brighter when highlighted.
* (Optional but cool) The artillery should have a speech bubble where they say something like, "Same Team, Same Team!" if you hit them
* Need to have a confirmation dialog appear when you quit the mission.
* Save / Load game information isn't updating after you save.
* Somehow the player is getting extra force fields or smart bombs out of nowhere.
* Typo in Tungsten's briefing for the Baron Cowfred Von Richthoofen mission
* The game needs to autosave every level.
* Upgrade Dialog: The reset button needs to be placed elsewhere, and not say "reset." People were accidentally hitting it instead of "Accept", or were afraid it would reset them to the previous MISSION.
*A notice should pop up when your helicopter is full
* The camera should center on the camera when it lands
* Better helicopter physics
* Scientists need to exit the secret labs more quickly
* The Old MacDonald's sign just teleports to the ground - it needs to have an animated fall.
* The briefing text should be a larger font (gee, it seems large enough to me on my 19" monitor... wonder why people were having problems on the little laptop).
* The game needs some good cow death screams
* The timer keeps counting down even after you die
* There shouldn't be a separate "Story" button and "New Game" button - a new game should always display the (skippable) story.
* Ran into a bug where the player suddenly had 2 forcefields, when they hadn't purchased any.
* Ran into a bug (using a cheat code) where Baron Cowfred Von Richthoofen became invulnerable.
* People laughed at the jokes, and the cow-balloons, and the cows on hang-gliders, and some of the briefing comments.
* The most important feedback of all - people kept playing. Eric Peterson came back and played it some more after checking out some of the other demos. This is a good thing!
* I also got some comments from other people who had seen my early-alpha last time about how much better it looks. And to a degree, I have you to thank for it! So, thanks!
* I had a key mapped to a special effect call, but I'd long gotten rid of the special effect and had left the call in. This was causing a crash when the key was hit accidentally.
* The bosses should generally escalate in power as they take more damage. I tend to keep their difficulty level pretty flat.

Man, I and I thought I was almost done with the programming tasks! There are more comments. I may not address all of these issues / problems. And some of the direct complaints and suggestions might not be at the root problem, but rather at other side effects or symptoms of the problem. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out Hanford Lemoore's recent article about this phenomenon, entitled "Don't Do What Your Users Say." But either way, this really tells me what people really noticed. In the first six levels. Great red-line analysis type stuff!

So there was my narrow view of the evening. Narrow, but completely worthwhile.


UPDATE: We got a picture! Thank you, Eric Hamilton. No, I'm not pictured.


(Vaguely) related Utah Indie Stuff
* Spring 2006 Utah Indie Night Report
* June 2005 Utah Indie Night Report
* Fall 2006 Utah Indie Night Report
* Summer 2006 Utah Indie Night Report
* Winter 2007 Utah Indie Night Report
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Labels: Apocalypse Cow, Indie Evangelism

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