To everyone who played my game at Adelaide's Anime Video Game Convention - AVCon - this weekend. If you have read some of my entries before AVCon you might notice how I have been lacking confidence about how things would turn out but I didn't need to worry. The two patches of the game - the one before I applied to AVCon and the one before the event - both felt like a race against time. A lot of people came around to play Lords of Illic and that made me incredibly happy. While I believe anyone who makes games independently has the right to call themselves an indie developer, setting up next to so many other talented people and being part of the indie showroom really made me feel like my dream had come true. So thanks to everyone involved in the event as well. Thanks all round really. The weekend really made all the effort feel worth it so thanks again. (The last thanks I swear). 

Since I am always looking to improve I wrote out a lot of notes on how to improve my game throughout the event. One of the most valuable was something I should have known. But learning through reading and through experience is quite different. If there is any way to incorrectly perform an action which does not give blatant feedback for what it is that is wrong, you will have to tell every single person who comes to your booth how it works. For each person who plays the game I have had to tell them:

• Press the start map button
• These two characters are your characters
• Everyone who is completely purple is an enemy
• Hold the start combat button
• Press X to select a unit
• Press X over a character to attack them
• You can directly select a character to fight them
• The combat preview tells you the exact results of combat
• Hold X to start combat

Interestingly enough on the second day when I brought a mouse (I don't know why I thought it would be better to only bring a controller the first day). I noted that the mouse controls were more intuitive to people. Though everyone was tripped up by the hold to start. That and it was much easier to decode what was going on when you could read the tooltips. I can only shudder to think what would happen if I hadn't spent the last couple of months improving the user experience. It goes to show how easily you can get caught up in your own world when making a game, especially if you don’t have the confidence to show it off. (Another fact I have been told on multiple occasions). 

Another interesting thing I found was that pretty much all of the younger children were drawn to have a look at my game. I did my best to help them play the game with mixed success - I guess like me that loved the bright and colourful characters in the game. It reminds me of a game I have seen on steam called Wildfrost which is a game with cute art that is a tactical card roguelite, I haven’t played it but I read some reviews which talk about how the cute aesthetic had brought in a crowd which would have trouble with the gameplay. It is something to keep in mind, but since I am dedicated to artistic vision rather than the market I think I will just do my best to make my style of art look as good as it can. That said, more than enough adults seemed to like my art and enjoy the game, so I am not too worried. Perhaps the better lesson would be that my game should have an easy mode. I can’t stand gatekeeping or elitism especially when it comes to games. I may have soloed Malenia relatively easily in Elden Ring (okay I had a lot of trouble with her on my first two characters but as they say third time's the charm) but there are more than enough games I have turned down to easy mode because it is just more fun that way. You should be able to choose how hard the game is.

I got a lot more feedback, most of it was around ways to make what was going on that much clearer though a couple people complimented me on how clear it was to understand despite how complicated it was. I’ll take that to mean that I was on the right track and strive to do even better in the future. I want to get a new build together soon, though that might not end up being until next month - I am pretty beat after the convention and Pikmin 4 just came out…

Until next time.