Dual use events! Inspire and educate the next generation as well as play test. Our recent experience at Insomnia games festival has lead us to change how we’re going to be trying to show at future events, thanks to a 9 year old girl who just kept coming back for more.
We’ve been taking Smash Hit Plunder to events since July 2014 in order to playtest the game to improve it. We’re often finding ourselves having to almost sell the VR too as it’s more often or not, someone’s first experience in VR never alone in a Gear VR.
It’s been incredible, with so much positive feedback. It’s helped with the comfort options, player customisation, controls, tutorial, level layout, shared multiplayer screen – and future unannounced awesome features.
At Insomnia, we did our first playtest since the demo launch. There’s still elements we’re learning, and every player helps. What we found at the festival was because the show was mainly talks by YouTubers, the crowd were mainly small children.
We had quite a number of repeat players we were seeing again and again over all three days, but one in particular was very passionate about the game and would hang out playing for at least 3 hours total while we were there.
First day, it was all about the demo we had showing. She played it again and again.
Second day she came back, I decided to give her all we developed so far – see how she would react. With her new expert opinion we found we needed to tweak a few thumbnails for our scavenger hunt mode, and the time allowed and balancing of our other levels.
I also decided to show her roughly how the game was made, how I made models, how everything was actually made of triangles (polys), what code looked like and how it enabled us to make things. She loved it, and was utterly amazed.
Third day, she returns. I show her how to use the scene editor and properties panel in Unity, and she’s away making her own level. She was making disco coloured lights, placing all the treasure we had in the game all over the floor in the room that you start, making sure her room had a bed in it, and finally her name on the wall.
I did a debug build to allow her to walk around, and she couldn’t quite believe that she made a game. She walked on top of the floating bed she made (she switched off gravity herself) and the game crashed. I got to explain the navmesh to her, and what a bug is, and how we may be able to fix it.
Before she sat down with us, she had no concept that games were made by people, she was 9 after all. After – she got her hands dirty and realised that she could make anything she wanted, any game she liked. I showed her and her mom Scratch by MIT, the start of her journey to game development!
After her, we started noticing children asking questions like “how long did it take you to make this?”, this is when we realised most children just have no idea that people make these games, and are curious themselves. I would ask their parents if they were interested in making games, and so much of the time it was “Yes, but I don’t know what software to buy.” – and I would send them to Scratch MIT to begin.
In the future, we should be a little more prepared, and actually ask the question “Would you like to make games?”. Depending on how busy we are, and what setup we have, would be great to show more kids how we’ve made the game to date in Unity.
