Yesterday was Demo Day and apart from a lot of setup problems it went really well. At first, the monitor kept displaying everything in yellow, and I couldn’t get the iPod on the same subnet as the PC until I got my own wireless router set up, but after that it went pretty smoothly. I’m still recovering though: my back is sore from dragging around the PC/laptop/monitor/wireless router/bag of cables and I still haven’t recovered from this week’s sit-a-thon. Also, last night when I was trying to go to sleep I kept getting images of that big green ball rolling around with various objects attached to it though, and this morning when I knocked over some bottles of shampoo in the shower, for an instant I thought that the movement was slightly unrealistic. I made a mental note to try changing the shape radius of the bottles… and then the instant was over and I reminded myself that I don’t need to evaluate how real every physical interaction I see is anymore.
The most enjoyable thing yesterday was seeing people get really involved with the game. Because the player’s objective is to grow the size of the ball, they seemed to get an emotional involvement in that ball. I always felt the same with Katamari Damacy and it was really rewarding to see other people reacting the same way. Two people played it through to the end, and many others went as far as they could. Unfortunately some of the early players couldn’t actually finish the game because I hadn’t fully finished tweaking it, but as players went as far as they could, I would make a note of what was stopping them and make the change for the next player. for example, for an object to attach to the sphere, it must be 0.006 times the sphere’s volume. I changed this to 0.0064 and then people were able to attach to the milk/juice cartons and clear up the whole room. I also saw cases where a player had picked up everything they could, but the volume ratio was about 0.0061 or even less, so I added a couple more gameboys to the room.
One thing that might invalidate some of the playtesting is that I was playing a pretty big part in the gameplay. It was more like Dungeons and Dragons than Katamari Damacy, in that sense. If I felt that a player was getting discouraged, I helped them by directing them to the next goal, or reminding them how close they are to being able to stick to all those bananas (“just get those two matchboxes and you should be able to roll up the bananas and apples and then you’ll be well on your way to finishing it!”).
My second reader is just as much a fan of Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) as I am, so he was pretty excited even just about the name “Yakumo”. Lots of other people seemed interested too, and even though I was in the very corner of the room I seemed to have a bit of a queue sometimes. One or two of my friends had to wait about 10 or 20 minutes in line to get to talk to me! The game itself seemed to take about 10~15 minutes to complete, and there were some interesting questions.
Actually, about questions: I didn’t feel like I had to do much presenting or that people had many questions. As I was hoping the game seems to stand pretty well by itself. I just explained the controls (move the iPod to control movement, move your finger on the screen to tweak the camera) and people were happy to play the game as it was. There weren’t many suggestions for what could be done to make it better (which is possibly a good thing!) and there weren’t many questions about how things worked. For example, I only got to explain my camera workings to one person, and it’s the same story with how objects stick to the ball.
When asked how much/what sort of work was involved it was difficult to decide where to start. The subsystems which tie together the various libraries? The YkRemote library (library for iPod interaction)? How the gameplay is defined in code? How I developed the thing (Subversion, blog, etc)? The development system (Xcode w/ gdb over the USB cable for the iPod, VC++ for the PC, Havok VisualDebugger for the physics.. all over two or three computers)? The content pipeline (creating assets in Paint.NET/3ds max and how they end up as interactive objects in the game)? There’s just so much to talk about. Not a bad thing considering I’ve so much report-writing ahead of me though!
So much report-writing…
