Windows Notepad has always been my favorite tool for organizing projects and tasks. And just today I discovered Simplenote, which is essentially a cloud-hosted, searchable and taggable collection of plain text documents. There is a free plan with minimal ads, and the iPhone app is free. So far I am loving it. Will report back after a couple weeks of using it to see how it stacks up.
Author: Ian
The Home Stretch
Tonight was another highly productive playtest, this time with none other than Greg Kasavin of Supergiant Games. After finishing Bastion, I have a new level of respect for Greg’s design and storytelling savvy, so I was really excited and anxious to hear what he would say about Escape Goat.
Overall he enjoyed playing it through, with just a few levels serving up more frustration than he would normally endure. The difficulty tuning is the main thing I am focusing on at this point, so it was great to know which levels were the real sticking points. He had great advice for extra aesthetics and details, like idle animations for the creatures and some more deliberate feedback for completing levels and unlocking new levels.
At this stage, the playtests still result in the usualy 3 pages of notes, but the related tasks are way less scary. It’s all about tuning, decorations, and minor glitches to fix. It’s coming along nicely and I can’t wait to present it to the XNA Creator’s Club soon.
The Background Music Makes It
Playtest Party Aftermath
This evening was a small scale playtest party with Randy O’Connor (who had played Escape Goat) and two of his friends (who had not). Huge props to them for sticking through and playing the WHOLE game start to finish, trading off levels among the three of them. Things got started around 8 and ended around midnight, with some breaks in there, so we’re still at about 3 hours of gameplay give or take.
I’ve got tons of notes, so it’s a matter of determining what’s possible to do for this game while still keeping control of scope.
I can also proudly say that for the first time, there’s no placeholder music in the build anymore. Not all songs are complete, so a couple levels shared the same background music, but it was all mine. I’m digging the sound so far and I hope you will too.