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Gamescom Indie Arena Booth Recap
Hi, everyone! If you’ve been keeping up with us on Kickstarter or Discord you probably already know all about it, but we recently wrapped up from our Gamescom and Indie Arena Booth festivities. We had so much fun hanging out in our virtual booth, seeing the game being played by fans on Twitch, answering questions, and chatting on Discord.
The response to the game was overwhelmingly amazing. Thanks to the event, we got so many new eyes on the game, lots of new friends and fans in Discord, and a wealth of valuable feedback.
Between our streams, Discord conversations, and bug reports, we now have a lot of data about how people played the demo and what issues they had. So now, we’re working on addressing that feedback as we transition back into making progress on the game.
In case you missed it, here is the YouTube playlist to which we are going to be uploading all of the videos from our Twitch streams in case you missed them (if they aren’t all there yet, don’t worry: they are being uploaded, we are just having some issues on our end. Stay posted!).
Now, on to feedback…
Next Steps
Organizing and quantifying feedback can be a lot of work, but it’s definitely work worth doing. So, we’ve been doing it!
The first thing we’re doing as part of addressing feedback is tagging and prioritizing. We went through each and every bug report to figure out a few things. First, whether other people are reporting the same thing (multiple reports of the same bug). Second, whether it’s a bug we already know how to fix/reproduce. And third, the priority, based largely on the number of reports.
From looking at this data it was immediately clear that there were a few things that came up over and over again in the demo, most of which you are probably familiar with if you’ve tried it. We have had a really sticky bug regarding the dog behavior AI that causes them to totally freeze and be unable to eat. This was a really annoying bug during gameplay, because it made it difficult (well, impossible) to take care of dogs: i.e. the main player task! Additionally, there were several issues with dogs getting caught on terrain (doorframes) that made handling them a problem. The good news with both of those issues is that we are already on the path towards fixing them with a totally new AI system that we will hopefully have a dev log about soon!
Additionally, the difficulty of the demo was a common complaint, in the bug reports and otherwise. This feedback is great for us, because it communicates a few things: that some mechanics for alleviating difficulty are not well-communicated, and that even for a demo, we should have made there be a better ramp-up with a longer period to ease players into the game loop. The reason for the difficulty is tied closely to wanting to show as much of the game as possible, and to keep the pace hectic so that – while some other mechanics are not yet implemented – the player is always busy. In future demos (and in the final game), these are things that we are going to be carefully to address.
I’m not going to mention our approaches for every piece of feedback we received, but the summary of our interactions with it is that we are going to utilize each and every piece of feedback to help make the game better. Whether that means explaining things better to our players, changing mechanics, fixing edge case bugs (hilarious, gamebreaking, or somewhere in between), or tweaking systems and designs. Some of the issues have already been fixed since Gamescom, and in between implementing new things, we’re going to continue to help make every part of the experience better!
Takeaways
As a developer, a huge takeaway from our experience with this event is to always include an easy-to-find, accessible way for players to provide feedback! The TTR demo included an in-game link to a bug report form, which made it easy for players to report issues and tell us their thoughts without having to cross the barrier of seeking out the best way to contact us. Even though this demo is considered to be a pre-alpha preview, having players provide feedback, even at this relatively early stage, was great! And for players: reporting bugs is always helpful, so thank you for doing it!
Additionally, events like this are extremely valuable for not only marketing the game, but for connecting with our audience and remembering why we’re doing this. Most everyone that has generously offered their feedback has been incredibly kind and understanding, and have given us helpful insights into what our game needs to be. It’s incredibly motivating to see people get so excited about our game. So for that, thank you!
Thanks for reading! Feel free to tell us in the comments or on Discord about your experiences with the demo and with Indie Arena Booth. Did you have any feedback that you didn’t submit during the event? Have you ever provided feedback that has had a measurable impact on a final game/product/experience/book/whatever? Let us know!
I hope you are all doing well. Cheers!
-Olivia