It's a familiar problem in game development coming up with a gameplay mechanic that will appeal to many players rather than just a few.
You Can't Please Everybody, But You Still Have to Try This had devastated Chris and he then spent the next two weeks locked in a room coming up with a better control scheme based upon the feedback he got. Once we had got past the usual hassles of network setups and praying hard that the game would actually run at all, the preview seemed to go well - it wasn't until we were out of the offices that Chris revealed that the guys at PC Gamer had not liked the control scheme at all. With the PC version of Multiwinia close to release, we trekked down to the Future offices, as is becoming something of an IV tradition, to show preview copies of the game to the likes of PC Gamer. It happened last year, during Multiwinia's development. So the first time we really got bitten from using this approach came as something of a nasty shock. This approach - although limited - seemed to work well enough for Introversion in the past since we made PC games it was easy to deliver preview code to third parties and particularly important, it was cheap. Our experiences developing Darwinia+ for XBLA and working with Microsoft have taught us a great deal about the fine art of playtesting and we have come a long way from where we started.įrom the beginning, Introversion has always relied on in-house testing and help from a loyal and supportive group of beta testers, most of whom come from the Introversion forums. When you've taken an idea, nurtured its embryonic form, built it lovingly from scratch into your fully-fledged all-singing, all-dancing next IP, it can be almost impossible to see it from the naive perspective of the first-time player, and yet this is essential if you are to make a game that appeals and makes sense to your audience. This can have a major impact on the playability of the game because as anyone who's developed a game knows, being the developer makes you fundamentally too subjective and biased to be a good play-tester. There are of course down sides too, and one of those is that we don’t have a massively large amount of resources to play with, which means that important activities like game testing are down to us and nobody else. The entrepreneurial vibe makes for a fantastically rich and creative environment, you have the opportunity to get involved in all aspects of running a business you wouldn’t usually get a chance to work in, and our flexible work ethos ensures a good work life/balance. Working for a small developer like Introversion has some fantastic benefits. Producer Byron Atkinson-Jones explains some of the challenges the company has faced in the past, and a few of the lessons learned. As we continue the series of editorial features penned by the popular indie team at Introversion, the spotlight moves onto the testing and feedback process.
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