Attraction Post #8: The Alpha

So yesterday we presented our game at the EAE open house and it was a huge success!  We had students, industry professionals, and news reporters come from all over the community to see the games being presented in the EAE South Lab.  Our team had done an incredible amount of work within the past two days to polish up the alpha.  Not only that, our programmers made minor tweaks to the alpha while people were demoing the game at the open house to make the experience even more enjoyable!

After each participant demoed the game, we had them fill out a quick survey with the following questions:

• How fun was the game?
• How difficult was the game?
• Were the controls simple to use/understand?
• What was your favorite thing about the game?
• What do you think should be changed/tweaked?

The responses were overall incredibly positive, except for one aspect: controls.  Because we mapped the magnetic beam's aim controls to the right analog stick, and jump control to the A-button, people had a hard time simultaneously jumping and aiming because both require the use of the right thumb.  This is a change we will fix for the final version, but it's great that we are getting critical feedback for our game this early in the development cycle.

It was great to see the community be so intrigued with each and every game at the EAE open house, and ours was no exception.  While demoing our game, people couldn't help but smile because of how much fun they were having with the magnetic mechanics.  Swinging from magnet to magnet, dodging obstacles, and figuring out just how to get through each section created a creative challenge for every participant.  Our game was also demoed by people of all ages, old and young, and it was amazing to see kids as young as 11 run through our game, and then restart it because they wanted to play it again.  The alpha was a success not only in getting our game critiqued, but because it was an opportunity to get our game out to the public and press.  The University of Utah Chronicle interviewed one of our programmers about our game and it became the front page news this morning along with 3 other games shown at the event.  All in all, we had a blast presenting our game to the public, and, if any of you readers came to the event and tried out our game, then we want to thank you for your time and support. Here is a link to the article if anyone would like to read it.

http://www.dailyutahchronicle.com/?p=2581577

What I accomplished this week:

• Created a gameplay trailer for the alpha
• Created the survey for people to fill out after they had demoed our alpha
• Rigged character poses and spliced together gameplay screenshot in preparation for the open house