As our first foray into the local Northern Ireland game dev network as Whitepot Studios, we attended the awesome PlayMyDemo event hosted at Belfast hackerspace and charity Farset Labs.

This was an event specifically designed for getting feedback on your most recent game demos and prototypes, with pizza too? (pizza and blog header image provided by the lovely Angie – check out her tea!).

We have completed the basic functionality of our Tube game and wanted to get some feedback on this – it still looks very stripped back, with no UI or custom assets in, but we just wanted feedback on the gameplay only. So, we loaded up two android devices (a phone and tablet) with test build APKs, and off we went!

At the event

Two android devices showing the tube demo build

When there, it was great to meet other studios and devs there including Italic Pig, Outsider Games, Lad McCool games, Mere Monkey, and our old friends at Pandara’s Box and Shallow Sky Studios.

I’m not sure how, but this was less scary than watching people live stream our Ludum Dare game, maybe it was because we were watching them play it in person?!

Thanks to @Redmagpie93 for giving it a wee go #playmydemo pic.twitter.com/VlAHwaAjRv

— Whitepot Studios (@Whitepot) October 11, 2016

.@Mere_Monkey ? good job! #playmydemo pic.twitter.com/judz5PtwoB

— Whitepot Studios (@Whitepot) October 11, 2016

He couldn't put it down, so that's a good sign ? #PlayMyDemo pic.twitter.com/JTrIoNslQt

— Whitepot Studios (@Whitepot) October 11, 2016

Once people became familiar with the controls, they wanted ‘one more go’, three or four times in some cases. ?

Feedback

Currently, you use your thumb or finger to move left and right to dodge obstacles, and double-tap to jump (with a cool down) to jump over obstacles. We got some great feedback, mostly regarding controls (some expected, some less expected).

• An option to invert controls for moving the ship vs. moving the tube – something we hadn’t thought of.
• Jump. Oh boy. Jump, jump, jump. Jump needs… yeah, new jump!
• We’re going to try a swipe-up jump with a stricter ‘swipe zone’ so the ship doesn’t strafe left or right unexpectedly. That’ll be for the next dev blog ?
• A you-know-what-I-meant factor – “Shouldn’t that swipe have moved the ship left? You know what I meant.”
• ‘Training wheel’ indicators on the best place to jump at first.
• Tablet optimisation very much needed.

Great feedback included

• Left and right movement feels really nice.
• Moving in mid-air is a nice touch.
• The tunnel style is cool.
• “This is like flappy bird, in a tube!”
• “This is horribly addictive” – well, we’ll take it. Better than, er,  “violently addictive”.

There’s a good lot more that we were able to add to our trello, so until next time, we’ll be working on making the jump better, adding additional player options, and beginning to actually make the UI and game assets ? We’re looking forward to the next one!

Bonus

There was a Vive at the event, and a HoloLens (from @ImmersiveTechNI)! Here’s Adam shooting arrows.

Adam with the Vive