Should have posted here sooner in dev, but we've ( @vintar, @jamotaylor, me) just "announced" the game we've been working on for Xbox One and Steam :D
We've been playtesting with people at the Durban meetups, which has been super helpful. I'll try post about our progress here, and hopefully some of you can come play and give us feedback sometime :)
Some people playing at EGE
We've been playtesting with people at the Durban meetups, which has been super helpful. I'll try post about our progress here, and hopefully some of you can come play and give us feedback sometime :)
Some people playing at EGE
Comments
Awesome job on all fronts!
But before that, here is a quick video I made of some people playing. I didn't want to have to constantly ask people for permission to record them, so that's about all the video I had.
The bad:
Organization at the event was pretty terrible. We got there on the Thursday (it opened on Friday), and had no power at our stand. We were promised that we'd have power by the afternoon, which never happened. Friday morning we arrived and still had no power, plus we'd been moved, so our banner was in the wrong place. When we eventually got power, the box had been wired incorrectly and shocked me when touching where it wasn't painted. So I covered it in bubble wrap and stuff worked well until right before closing time when somehow the power cable burned itself out. They came to fix our power, opened up the box, and proceeded to leave exposed live ends on a soggy floor. The next morning it had still not been fixed. About 30 minutes after opening we had power again, yay!
The good:
Pretty much everything else. The expo was a lot nicer than I thought it would be (albeit a bit smaller than I had imagined).
Our goals for the expo were:
- Get feedback on the core game, gameplay, and get a broader idea of whether it is fun (since we have a relatively small number of people that have actually played it).
- Find bugs, and see if there were any consistent things that just didn't work in normal gameplay, with normal people.
I'd say we definitely achieved both of those. It was a pretty amazing feeling watching complete strangers having a blast playing our game. We had a very varied bunch of players ranging from young kids, all the way through to over 50's. Interestingly, we had quite a few older people that didn't want to play (since they didn't play games), and just watched for 10, 20 minutes. We also had a fair amount of kids playing who managed to convince their parents to play with them.
Mass-llama slaughter: because family is important!
We received lots of great suggestions, and things we can improve. As well as lots of positive feedback.
And a mention on LazyGamer http://www.lazygamer.net/south-africa/ege-2016-back-better/
Also fantastic was the showing of local indie games. I had an absolute blast with VALA aka Vicious Attack Lama Apocalypse, which describes itself as “the world’s best mass llama-slaughter roguelike-lite-ish couch co-op twin-stick shooter”. There was also lots of fun to be had with ControlShift, Polygod, Mega-Zerds, critical hit BroForce and much, much more. Last year’s local indie game showing was good, but this year was brilliant and I saw many a young gamer getting hooked on these usually more accessible games (with one kid of about 6 years old just destroying all records on VALA).
It was pretty costly, considering we're self-funded:
Flights: R3000
Rental: R1200
EGE Craft Market table and power: R2400
Total: R 6600
In terms of number of players
There were about 25 "active" show hours. Each player played for about 10 minutes (some shorter, some longer). That makes a total of 150 sessions.
There were very few times when we had less than 4 players at a time, but let's say 3. That makes 450 people. Take that down to about 400 because we had a few groups coming back multiple times.
So basically we paid R16 per play tester ;-)
(@jamotaylor left, me right)
Even if no one ever buys a copy of the game, at least we've had a bunch of fun doing different things :)
Also, I discovered you can actually edit videos in Photoshop, and all the usual PS tools work. That is really great for people who need something easy and already have bought PS.
(@jamotaylor)
(me)
If you want one for some reason I've uploaded the files here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1799737/
It isn't super polished, and it isn't meant to be a public facing gameplay trailer, but here it is:
After a lot of documentation and last minute bug-fixing, we successfully submitted to Xbox One "optional light cert" today!
It doesn't mean the game is content-complete, or balanced etc, but it is a milestone of sorts. Now we wait to find out how many of the thousand rules we broke :)
How does that work? Is there an easy-ish path for locals to get on the XBOne? I was under the impression that it was far more difficult nowadays than it was back on XBLA, and that there was pretty much no support for South Africans at the moment. Has that changed?
Back when the XB1 first came out MS announced a program called ID@XBOX.
It took us a long time to get into the program. I can't remember exactly how long, but it was something like a year of back and forth before we got into the program, our game concept was approved, and we got [2 free] dev kits. I will say though that we didn't have much beyond some badly made concept documents, and a mobile prototype (the one you made some shaders for!) to show them. I imagine that it was MUCH easier for devs that had previously published games.
Also, because it was right when the ID@XBOX program first started, they were very under-staffed. I assume it would be easier to get a response from them now.
So the process is to apply to http://www.xbox.com/en-US/developers/id , submit a concept doc and supporting docs about your game, get accepted, sign lots of papers, get devkits and SDKs (and free Unity if you use that), finish the game, go for cert, publish.
Cert is much more stringent than XBLA days, as ID@XBOX games go through the same cert process as AAA titles.
And thanks for sharing your insights on getting your game onto XBox. Knowing is half the battle, and having that information will help future devs plan better when they're looking to launch on a console (or at least know what they need to aim for).
And because Xbox has status things we can call, we can see when those players are actively playing, vs sitting in the menu, vs offline. Right now there are 5 people online playing.
And we're tracking tons of different events at play-time, so we can also see stuff like (the green bars) that this particular tester has killed 4000 llama over 32 deaths.
It also shows progress towards achievements, which we can use to work out stuff like how he is playing, if he's doing the challenges we popup, what weapons he's used, etc.
As far as I can tell, the one tester in particular is playing to win - as in, he's playing the game as we intend to progress.
I guess this just excites me, because even if we sell zero copies, at least somewhere in this world, there have been a bunch of people that played the game. Even if they were paid :P
Also, all of this can be turned off via privacy settings on the Xbox I think.
Side note, analytics in general is super interesting, and gets super in-depth. One thing I love in app and web analytics is hotspots:
Pretty crazy to think that on any site with good analytics, your mouse movements are being tracked.
We failed 9 requirements, which I'm pretty happy with (there are ~91 checks in total - although not all of them apply to us).
Luckily they were mostly just to do with our user handling which we've since made better, and the rest shouldn't be too hard to address.
Is a PS4 release on the horizon too?
Our current plan for PS4 is "at some point after PC/Xbox release". We are in their indie program, but right now we have tons to do for Xbox and Steam, so it just isn't realistic to be doing PS4 alongside. Even if we could, last I checked their devkits were crazy expensive :( (Microsoft gave us 2 devkits free).
That all being said - the game is in Unity which PS4 natively supports, so it just means redoing the platform specific stuff (achievements, storage, controllers, etc), which isn't too bad.
p.s. The blood is weirdly bright right now for some reason.
Transparent meshes are difficult to make shadowed. For something like blood, I'd try a bright red, but set to multiply. (There are a bunch of other workarounds, but they're even more case-specific.)
I'm not sure if anyone signs up for those, but worth a shot.
So I'm hoping there are some people here who would be interested in testing and giving us feedback on the game.
To play you'll need a game controller (it does work with PC, but it really isn't nice playing like that yet). We've only tested on Xbox 360 and Xbox One controllers so far unfortunately.
It should run on most relatively new Windows PC's. I don't have an actual min spec to tell you, but it won't work well on an integrated intel GPU. Also, the download is pretty hefty at ~2.5GB.
I'd prefer to not put a public download, so please leave a message here or send me a message and I'll get you a build in a few days (just got to clean up a few last things).
One last thing worth mentioning, is that it is much more fun with friends (up to 4 players local co-op), so bonus points if you have those.
Thanks!
PC Spec:
CPU - Intel Core i5-4460 @3.20 GHz
RAM - 16 GB Corsair Ballistix
GFX - AMD Radeon R7 200
OS - Windows 10
Intel Core i7 6700k / 64GB DDR4 RAM / GTX 1080 / Windows 10 Pro
Hope I meet your min spec. :P
What a mission keeping it below the 2MB limit...
https://gfycat.com/SophisticatedVigilantGiantschnauzer
Got some good comments on reddit about it, and I'm going to try some stuff to make the jump and fall part a bit more feedbackey. Starting with trying some small thrusters facing upwards that trigger at the top of the jump.
But, we have mechanised units beating down on poor unprovoked, innocent Llamas. :(
I cannot help but feel sorry for those Llamas. That's the problem for me. Sorry. Them being the enemy detracts from my overall feel of ridding the world of a menace. AKA a worthy cause. I just want to cuddle them? Am I wrong? Missing the point?
Make me see their evilness. Please. :D
So firstly, the HUD. We've received feedback from a lot of the people that played it that the HUD was a bit confusing. So we've done two things, firstly, we've changed the design around since the nov video to (hopefully) be clearer. Secondly, the game has a tutorial now that goes step by step through was each bit is.
Just quickly (with a terrible quality image from a video I had with me now, sorry):
(edit: lol, doesn't help that the site is also stretching it)
Top left are your 3 main abilities: Dash, Jump/Smash, Shield. The curved bar around those is your energy level (used for all 3 abilities). Each icon will go greyed out if you don't have enough energy for it.
The horizontal bar to the right of that is health.
At the top are your left and right primary weapons, and the smaller one in the center is a "special" single use pickup.
At the bottom left are all the passive perks you've picked up in the current playthrough (holding info/tab puts a name next to each one if you forget the icon).
The HUD color is based on the color of that player.
Being a 4 player co-op, each corner of the screen gets a different players HUD. Starting at top left, going clockwise.
Next...cuddly llamas.
Firstly, llamas are not cuddly. Alpacas are.
Simply searching for "llama attack" on youtube will show countless horrific incidents.
Here is a prime example of a child that barely escaped with his life, and will be traumatized forever, eventually turning to a life of crime.
If you are still not convinced, then the story in the game should cover it. We don't just throw you in with a bunch of furry creatures and make you murder them, there is reasoning to all of this.
If the story fails (i.e. you don't buy into it, in the same way that you may simply not accept killing a mutant dog in Resident Evil), then the absolute last fallback I have for you is that at the end of the day it is a game, these things have destroyed most of the city, and if you don't kill them, they will kill you.
Your next question may be how they can possibly damage a steel mech. Individually, there isn't too much damage most of them can do. But take a few hundred pissed off llamas in real life, and they'll pretty much destroy anything.
Hopefully this has answered your question :)
Full-res non-gif thing
We've all spent a lot of time learning as none of us had much experience in games before this, but I don't feel like the time we've spent is too long for what we've achieved (although my bank account disagrees).
Side note: I updated the website today with shiny gifs and stuff!
http://www.valagame.com/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/659110/Vicious_Attack_Llama_Apocalypse/
If you feel so inclined, maybe you could wishlist it :D
And some random gifs:
Anyway, here is what our wishlists are like now:
The first bump is when it first went up, the second is when I sent our a newsletter:
These newsletter stats seem MUCH higher than the "industry average", which is sad because even still less than half of subscribers opened the email.
Besides the email, I'm not really sure where people are coming from to find the page. It is hidden WAY down in the "coming soon" area on Steam, but nowhere else.
Also, here are updated wishlist stats
I did an interview (starts at 7:21)
Had lots of people playing, a lot more than last year - probably partly to do with streamlining how we handled turns. Last year it was a bit of a mess, but this year we made proper queues, did groups of 4, and allowed 1 life (they could be revived but once dead they were dead).
Friday was the quietest day, but for Saturday and Sunday we had 4 playing almost all the time. Same as last year it felt cool when people would come back and wait in line again to play.
We were better prepared this time, with business cards! We handed out almost 1000 (got on special for R275 :P). It didn't seem to make much of a difference unfortunately, as hits to the site didn't really go up much.
Probably around 70 people came from the cards.
(the rest of this is mostly just copied from the steam post I did)
Thanks to Steam stats we can see that over the 3 day expo:
130492 llamas were slaughtered
2721 streetlamps were destroyed
$101,152,915 of damage was done to the world
512 players died, and then were revived by their friends (awww)
These kids were my favorite. They dragged their mother back all 3 days and played multiple times.
(Blood and gore can now be disabled in the pause menu at runtime!)
Here are some photos of happy people sitting on chairs
We also got to take Llamar the llama out of his cage
There was tons of cosplay. My favorite was MasterChief, so I gave him Llamar and asked him to do something from Halo.
I've only played 343 hours of Halo, so I must not have reached the horse-riding level yet.
( @sumisukyo )
I've started working on that, and it is looking pretty good.
It is still very "jumpy" when you move fast though (ignore that the mech moves all legs at once when it starts moving, fixed that), so I'm going to go watch some spiders or something.