Public Showcase Debrief

Hey everyone, Sam here to tell you about a recent public showcase we had for Gaze. This public showcase largely served as the last big playtest for the game. Being a capstone game, this showcase pretty much marks the end of major game development for the game (at least in the academic sense). While we certainly will continue to polish and refine the game as we continue to submit to prospective festivals, development will be rather limited as the team transitions from students to full time workers. All that being said, we were largely satisfied with the feedback and turnout of the public showcase. Our ultimate goal for the 6 months of capstone was to create a polished 10 minute puzzle platformer experience, and I believe we were largely able to accomplish this goal. Despite performance issues (frame rate dips when players respawn or collect one of the 3 stars needed to progress) and some issues with the stiffness of the controls, most players spent a prolonged time playing our game, which was definitely useful.

Moving forward, the previous mentioned issues (performance problems, stiffness of controls) will be what we focus on to truly make this game a portfolio piece. In addition, a problem that we didn’t realize occurred as players have difficulty even with the first couple of puzzles. While this maybe attributed to the fact that most of the people attended the showcase were non to casual gamers, it still shows tunnel vision on my part for making the game a little too difficult. Since most of our playtesters in our other tests tended to be typical gamers, it is hard to tell in what ways we can improve on accessibility and making this game easy to understand for even people on the more casual spectrum. Thus, we will take this new knowledge with us and do another round of re-designing our puzzles. We won’t make any drastic changes, but reflecting on what we have and in what we ways we can make our game as least frustrating as possible.