Lessons from showing 'We Go Alone' at EGX

The experience of exhibiting a game for the first time, having hundreds of people play our game, was overwhelming in so many ways. It was great to get positive feedback on reinforcement to the fact that our development time hadn't been in vain, but having flaws with design and execution repeatedly exposed was, while hugely helpful, absolutely draining. There's a lot of aspects of our demo I would have changed, in hindsight, coming into an event like EGX, and having to design such a short demo has taught me a lot about creating engaging, narrative heavy content.

One of the main problems with our demo was that, despite showing the controls at the start, we didn't have an explicit tutorial. Instead we tried to demonstrate how the player is supposed to play through environment and sound. For example, players could figure out that they were supposed to attack bugs due to genre archetypes, so we tried to show that they could reach one of the moving platforms by putting a bug on it, hoping they would try to whip it and realise the platforms could move. This didn't work for about 98% of players, and I had to jump in pretty much every time to demonstrate how to progress in the level. This approach to teaching the player could work with a clearer visual language in a full release, but didn't work for us in a demo. The goal is to have a demo that you don't need to be standing over at all times, allowing the player to figure everything out for themselves independently, and for that a more obvious tutorial is needed to explain how mechanics work quickly.

This understanding could have also been improved with a more defined visual language - specifically, how we visualise to the player what all the pieces in the world can do. For example, we had moving platforms that were plain in design and green in colour, with subtle arrows to show where and how they could move. These didn't stand out to the player for three main reasons. Firstly, other tiles in the world - static tiles - shared a similar colour to the movable ones, meaning they didn't always stand out. Secondly, a lot of the other tiles had very lavish designs on them, making the moving platforms the least interesting thing on the screen, and therefore not seen. Thirdly, our arrow design blended in with the style of the game and didn't make it clear they could be moved. We need to work on how we visually demonstrate importance and function regarding the interactions in the world. This also applied to creating unified layers in the game; we had a lot of interesting looking panels, but they didn't all suit a unified style, causing confusion when moving around and between layers.

Another aspect that caused confusion was the lack of communication to the player regarding our narrative concept and the mechanical metaphor. The level is set inside a memory of the Prince, and whilst I was successful in setting up the journey of the necromancer with the opening cut-scene, what happened after was lost on many players. One suggestion that I will definitely heed is to show the entrance to the memory through the transition between cut-scene and gameplay - to show where the necromancer is going and how he arrives in the game space. This dissonance between metaphor and gameplay was deepened through the muddling of concrete-style assets and abstract ideas that just didn't work together. For example, the moving platforms made the sound of a stone moving along concrete when they were whipped, yet were able to pass through other solid-looking platforms and appeared to float in mid air. This meant that players couldn't understand how to solve certain puzzles as it wasn't made clear how the rules worked within the narrative space. This could be avoided by committing to the abstract metaphor, making the platforms sound more ethereal when moving and making it visually clear they can move through others.

Our lack of communication extended to the implementation of the notebook feature. When the player finds a unique object in the world, the character writes a notebook entry to give more detail to this, building the second tier of the story. However, it wasn't made clear what these objects actually were, which would have been okay had it been obvious what was happening when one was found. We did have a small icon in the top right corner, but this was ignored by most players. When someone did open the notebook, it would not take them to the page they had just discovered, creating a dissonance between the gameplay and the story. It needs to be made clear why the necromancer is writing these instances down, why it's relevant to the player, and why - and how - they should collect all of the pages available.

There were many more lessons on design and communication we learnt, but the main thing is to really consider the purpose of a short demo, and try to tell the player why they want to play this game further with as few interactions as possible. I've taken on board so much from this experience, and really would approach this task completely differently in the future.