A Change in Plans
Fresh out of the gates, eager and excited to release a title, AA Battery Games has spent the majority of 2016 churning out art assets and implementing mechanics for our first professional mobile game, 'GuildMaster', scheduled to launch early next year.
With consistent internal play testing throughout development, we have been able to define a lot of content for the mid to late game, and had scheduled to generate the assets for this content over the coming months. As with the majority of our development so far, our focus has been primarily on basic functionality. Simply making it work was enough for us to tick it off our list, and we would set aside time later in the schedule to refine the art, and clean up the bugs.
But we recently had somewhat of an epiphany. We were both a little surprised that it took us this long to realize it, but the recent external playtest was the most conclusive yet: We need to refine.
Throughout this insightful day, player after player restated the same messages: "You need a tutorial", "I can't see how much upkeep I need to pay", "These bugs take a lot away from the game", and we could see it. We sat there next to each person, watched them play as we explained the game's mechanics, and eventually began to predict the feedback. But we also noticed that the majority of the content we had generated during the previous milestone wasn't being accessed. Not for lack of trying, but players just weren't getting to build the advanced rooms.
At the end of the afternoon, during the walk back to the office, we discussed the feedback and within minutes came to the same conclusion. We had to stop generating content and refine the content we had. The next work day, we sat down in the office, opened up our production schedule, and cleared the next eight weeks. We had two weeks left before our next milestone, and six weeks for the milestone after that. Two weeks wouldn't be quite enough time to get a tutorial implemented as well as get critical information to the HUD and streamline the questing process. Considering that players had more frequently called for information and process streamlining, we decided the tutorial could wait the two weeks.
So that was it. We scheduled the polish and got to work. We started with streamlining the questing process, adding in more buttons to switch between quests without backing out of the menu, unifying the fonts across the whole game, and finalizing the art assets. It's only been a week since the revolution, but we've already had positive feedback. Another programmer in the office was watching us test and when he saw us switching seamlessly between quests he let out a relieved "Yes!"
After we got stuck into it and started testing our refinements, we began to see one of the biggest improvements in our game so far. The game looked more like the finished product than ever before. With this we realized that refining and polishing the game not only made it better to play, but also made it more finished. It wasn't just a bunch of .png's thrown together with some code any more. It was reaching completion.
We got carried away with generating content, developing a tunnel vision of creating rooms for players to build in the late game, unable to see how unpolished and lacking refinement the core gameplay was. One major benefit of being a small team is our ability to quickly turn development in a new direction. Our development cycle, being based off of agile development, was easily interrupted to allow for higher priority development to take place.
This was an important lesson for us, to keep our eyes open to what’s missing, and not just look at what we haven’t done yet. We're very excited about getting the refinements uploaded to itch.io for everyone to play, and we're hoping we'll hear something a bit different in the feedback.
