Well, some of these aren’t frequent. But we wanted to answer them anyway!
How many players does Torch support?
Is the game cooperative?
How much of the space is lit vs. dark? Does this change depending on the number of players?
What kind of TV are you highlighting?
How do people respond to dividing their attention between the phone and TV?
What is the story of Torch?
How am I introduced to the story if i jump in mid-game? Is it needed to have a complete experience?
Does your game appeal to mom or sister?
Are you going for a scary Lord of the Rings style with BarrelEye, or a comical Monsters Inc style?
Are you designing for the CES audience, or people at home on couches, or both?
It seems like you’re a bit skewed toward CES 2013 right now; is that OK with your client?
What other “torch” games did you find, and how is yours unique?
How did you manage your non-traditional ETC process?
Do you have a main question for each playtest? Are you documenting the answers and resultant iterative changes?
What feedback did you get from playtesting? What was most surprising?
what are your contingency plans?
What makes your project unique?
What is the “Wow!” moment you are trying to create? What is it that you want the guest to remember the next day? Is it the game? The on-screen interaction? The person-to-person interaction?
How many players does Torch support?
One to four players. Every player needs a mobile device to play, and you also need a smart TV for the group. We’re considering letting a fifth player support the group using the TV remote.
Is the game cooperative?
Yes! Your overall objective (defeat BarrelEye and save the princess) is a cooperative one, and players are all working toward that end. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for some friendly competition though, and we’re doing our best to facilitate both play styles.
How much of the space is lit vs. dark? Does this change depending on the number of players?
When the game begins, the dungeon is almost entirely dark. As you progress you will light up more and more of the screen until it is almost fully lit. With more players this process can go faster – we’re working on ways to balance this, but it seems to work pretty well right now.
What kind of TV are you highlighting?
A smart TV. We can’t be more specific than that at this time.
How do people respond to dividing their attention between the phone and TV?
Some people find it a bit frustrating, others seem to handle it fine (One tester suggested those who are familiar with Wacom tablets are most likely to handle the two-screen setup well). We are especially wary of this challenge, and we are adding lots of elements to the game to explicitly tell players which screen to look at on a regular basis. It may seem a bit controlling, but we find this works very well in similar games.
What is the story of Torch?
A monster called BarrelEye captures the princess of light and holds her in a dark dungeon. A group of adventurers travels to the dungeon to defeat BarrelEye and save the princess, restoring light to the world.
How am I introduced to the story if I jump in mid-game? Is it needed to have a complete experience?
The story isn’t essential – like many classic games, the story of Torch is a loose framework within with you create your own story through gameplay. If you jump in mid-game we’ll be dropping all kinds of hints about the boss, BarrelEye via our environment design, and you’ll still rescue the princess at the end. And, worst-case, the game is only about three minutes so you can easily start at the beginning again if you really want to see the opening scene.
Does your game appeal to mom or sister?
Yes and no. We’re trying to create an art style that’s kind of spooky and cute at the same time. We’re not exactly appealing to a hardcore gamer audience, but there’s definitely some classic arcade DNA in the game which might not be mom’s cup of tea. That’s okay though – it has to be appealing enough for everyone to try once, and designed to really hook a subset of that audience.
Are you going more for a scary Lord of the Rings style with BarrelEye, or a comical Monsters Inc style?
Definitely more MI than LOTR. A friend of mine likes to refer to “childhood sinister,” which is still a little dark but overall pretty close.
Are you designing for the CES audience, or people at home on couches, or both?
The primary audience is definitely the press at CES 2013. Ideally they could envision a longer version of the experience being played at home, but that’s a goal for the future – right now it’s all about CES.
It seems like you’re a bit skewed toward CES 2013 right now; is that OK with your client?
Actually, it’s our client that has pushed us so far in that direction. Every time we meet with them they re-emphasize the importance of standing out in a crowd, getting the experience across in seconds and minimizing disconnect points, all with the goal of being as effective as possible at CES.
What other “torch” games did you find, and how is yours unique?
We actually haven’t looked at any other games with this exact mechanic. If you know of one, please tell us about it! etcbarreleye AT gmail.
How did you manage your non-traditional ETC process?
I’m not sure what’s non-traditional about it; we’ve just been moving very, very fast. Our client asked us to be feature-complete by Halves and we’ve structured our schedule around that goal. Expect our postmortem to have more detail about our schedule breakdown.
Do you have a main question for each playtest? Are you documenting the answers and resultant iterative changes?
This is something we’ve found particularly challenging. Because of our condensed schedule, every playtest has also an integration test of sorts, with a dozen new features that need to be tried and a dramatically different overall feel to the game. We do have a specific set of project metrics we are trying to track across all our playtests, and we are getting better at coming into each playtest with specific questions in mind. Our playtests so far have uncovered many issues that never would have occurred to us.
What feedback did you get from playtesting? What was most surprising?
We’re trying to document this in blog posts about the playtests. The biggest surprises so far have been:
- It’s really hard to get controls right on a touchscreen! And it varies dramatically by audience. With a controller there’s kind of a “right” way to use it, but hand someone a phone and they might hold it portrait or landscape, use fingers or thumbs, tap or drag or tilt. No one system seems to be most “intuitive” and we still haven’t figured out where the best balance between intuitive and appropriate for our game sits.
- People get lost very easily, and they always want more hints. As originally designed the game was much too complex and difficult and we keep pulling that complexity back. We have to remind ourselves that we are essentially making the easiest possible level of what could be a much bigger game.
What are your contingency plans?
So, there are lots of things that could go wrong on this project since we have a limited timeline and a fairly complex design and we’re working with unfamiliar hardware. We should take this a challenge at a time.
- What if you overscope/run out of time?
We’re fighting this as hard as we can, and we’ve already asked our client to move a deadline back by a week. Fortunately they were very gracious about that. The good news is that our schedule has some breathing room, and we can shave off one layer of polish if we really need more implementation time. However right now our schedule shows that our goal is well within reach, and we’re aggressively utilizing Scrum to track our progress and catch potential problems as early as possible. - What if the TV doesn’t work?
We were a lot more worried about this around quarters, but we’ve now built some demo applications to the TV and it seems like we’ll be able to build something substantial for it. We are already connecting to it over the network and displaying animated sprites, so the scariest parts are done. If somehow things go terribly horribly wrong, we are maintaining a Unity version of the TV client that can run on an external box connected to the TV, and will make the full gameplay experience available with a PC instead of a smart TV. We would be very sad if the TV doesn’t work though. - What if the game’s not fun?
Once again, we’re doing everything we can to make sure this doesn’t happen (it’s already sort of fun!) and we would be very sad if people don’t like our game. That said, if we can create a unique experience that makes people curious and demonstrates the potential of a connected living room, we’ve done our job.
What makes your project unique?
Besides being an action game running on a smart TV connected to mobile phones? Our goal is to make a game that doesn’t just use the phones as wireless controllers, but significantly takes advantage of the multiple screens available so that it could not be played on any other hardware. Wii U doesn’t support this many screens. Connecting phones doesn’t give you a main screen for the dungeon map view. Connecting phones to the computer would work, but there’s something about sitting on couches around a TV that serves Torch better. Perhaps the closest thing gaming has seen until now was the GCN-GBA link system, but the GBA didn’t have an accelerometer or touch screen, and not many people got to try the GCN link. Smartglass could probably do something similar, but it hasn’t been seen much in games yet. Without a doubt, we are in a barely-explored territory.
What is the “Wow!” moment you are trying to create? What is it that you want the guest to remember the next day? Is it the game? The on-screen interaction? The person-to-person interaction?
We want to make people aware of the one-to-one connection between what they’re seeing on their phone and what’s happening on the TV. The game and interpersonal interactions should be supporting that experience. In particular, our game is designed to get players to look at the phone at first (when the dungeon is dark) and to slowly move their attention to the TV as they play (as the dungeon is lit more brightly). By the time they hit the boss encounter, all eyes should be on the TV. At that point we want one of the boss’ abilities to take the TV view away, and abruptly drive the players back to their phone, effectively reminding them of the two-screen experience. Our client has also given us a goal of getting a reporter to win the game and turn their phone to the camera – if we can make the end-game celebration include the mobile device in a meaningful and memorable way, we’ll know our job is done.