Norwich Games Festival

 What we done

We made a poster board for our game, put it onto a disconnected PC, and took it too the Forum in Norwich for the Norwich Games Festival. We showed off our game to the public, got some people to paly test it and got some feedback for the game. We were also promoting ourselves and explaining to people how we made our game and different roles within the games industry and making a game to those interested to know.

How it went

I think the event went really well. We got some valued feedback from our game, and having fresh eyes look and test our game was high beneficial. It taught me a lot about what makes a good game and how to get members of the public interested. It was also important as it taught us all how to talk to members of the public about making game and our process, having spent so long making it privately, talking over our process and how it was made allowed us to be able to more properly explain our process and see what we could of done to improve it. 

Preparing for the event

To prepare for the event we had to finish the game, make a promotional poster board, make a production booklet and prepare what we might say to people and how to describe the game. We managed to get the game into a somewhat finished state so players could play it, and even added a small ending, however, we didn't add enough game direction into the game, so we had to guide anyone playing it to where parts of the game such as keys and interactions were. For the poster board I designed a poster to promote our game, then stuck screenshots of the different levels of our game to the sides so people could see what was included in the game. I also added some decorative pieces to draw people's attention, such as patterns on the background and blue tentacles. Our teammate Emilia also made a design document for our team, which describe how we came up with the idea, how it evolved and how we developed the game from start to finish. This was majorly helpful as we used this design document to talk to people at the festival about how we made the game and aspects we were planning to add but never got a chance.

Giving a talk

I also gave a talk at the festival as well as some people in my class. I gave a talk about how to design monsters within games and how to do this effectively. I made this presentation light, and with simplistic theory and ideas so it could easily be understood by anyone watching who wasn't an artist. I described how shape and colour theory is often used in monster design to convey how to defeat an enemy, how it might attack and where it might be. At the end I designed my own small monster with these principles and got others to design a boss version of my design. This ended up getting a lot of engagement, inspiring lots of ideas and people seemed to enjoy drawing and coming up with ideas about how it might look as a boss.  

Link to the power point  forum presentation copy.pptx 

What I would do next time

Next time, I would want the game in a more finished state with more gameplay. The game had little player direction and often led the player to getting lost or confused about what they needed to do. We also didn't have a very good or conclusive ending, ending it in a somewhat jumpscare which left most players dissatisfied and confused on what happened. We didn't show and explain much of what the game was about either, and we kept getting questions about what the game was about and how to play it. Having controller accessibility would of also been very beneficial as most kids didn't know how to play with keyboard and mouse and were left confused on how to control the character.