Thursday, July 5, 2018

Californian Independents

I have now attended meetups of both the Indie Dev Club (the LA indies) and OC Indie Developers. The LA meetup was at a bar and had a lot of people showing up for the first time. Probably more audio devs than game devs. Around 30ish people showed up and I was able to demo my game along with a few other games on a crowded wood table on a back patio with no power outlet. A little awkward.

I met several people and made some connetions and missed some connections. First, there was Evan from Ohio who'd just moved to LA to work for a tech startup after spending 5 years as a solo indie dev and having no success. He said he wanted to warn people to not go full time. Whoops. He and I did get along tho, just chatting about the games we liked and didn't like. He made an arena shooter where you play as a laser crab like thing and that can climb walls and lunge at people.

https://deceivergame.com

His laptop ran out of power before mine and then he decided to leave, so I didn't get to play it. By the time my laptop got low on power, the one table in the back patio that was near an outlet was available to I moved to that one.

So, you think it's infuriating to watch well intentioned lovely people struggle to play your game? Well, watching a mildly interested drunk Australian who frequently receives text messages was the worst. We may end up being friends, because he was a chill dude and I saw him at another LA game relate event, so if he reads this, oh well. But man.

Also, two men in collared shirts and ties approached me and turned out to be a principal and a teacher at a local elementary. They saw my game and people playing it and wanted to know what was happening. I explained we were part of a meetup. They were interested in having me/us come to their school and teach kids programming for games. They were also very drunk. I directed them to out meetup coordinator and gave them my number. I don't think anything's come of it. You know, I'm like that super hot girl at the bar who gave her number to a guy who's just too scared to call back because I'm just so super hot.

So while the LA indies was like at a cool bar, but outdoor on a back patio with no outlets, the Orange County meetup was at a tech office space with excellent graphically designed logos in a business park in Irvine. All nerdy dudes and no women, with a formal structure of each game being demo'ed one at a time. And free pizza. It effectively had something that I've been wanting the Boston indies to do: a focus group experience. While the other games were single player, I was able to have 8 guys playtest my game for 15 minutes and then the whole group listened to me explain abotu the game and then I posed a few questions and got some helpful feedback.

Specifically, I told them my struggle with playeres identifying themselves at the start of the game.  Some players very quickly leave the treehouse and then deciding on whether or not to zoom the screen out or follow them is tricky and so I had been thinking about adding a player select screen. Somebody proposed using just the treehouse as a starting level and everyone can still wake up there and then once every player has gone down the ladder, it transitions. This was a pretty elegant solution, I thought. Better than my half bakead idea of using the cloudy background and players 'waking up' in the clouds and then when everyone's ready, it drops away.

I have sorta implemented this, but not exactly. What I've currently done is to make the island the treehouse is on much smaller and to immediately zoom out to the normal viewing distsance as soon as one player leaves the tree, instead of waiting for the whold group. This way, no matter where you walk on the island, and no matter if other players are still in the treehouse, everyone's on the screen together. The issue remains though that if someone climbs up to the dog nests and takes flight, then the camera has to choose whom to keep on screen. I'm considering starting with the nests empty and the players have to work together to summon their dogs. As in, if 5 people are awake (read: 5 people are playing), then all 5 have to climb down from the treehouse and simultaneous light a magic fire that will summon the dogs. Or something. This means that no one will be able to get off screen until everyone has figured out what color they are, which buttons are A and B, and how walk around.

Anyway. I'm going back and forth working on that and network code. I'm excited about these indie groups. Especially 2 of them! I get to go to 2 meetups a month, which is good, because it gives me deadlines that aren't too stressful, but still motivating, and they also have cool people into gaming, which is nice.

2 comments:

  1. Check out Glitch City too in Culver City if you haven't already - https://www.facebook.com/GlitchCityLA/ - they have game nights once a month and occasional demo nights. Its in their own space so there is power :)

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  2. (haha. i guess i don't have comment notifcations enabled, bc i never get comments). but yeah i will. i've seen it suggested on meetup.com some and was curious.

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