Hi, I’m Adam “Gahlammon” Dachtera, team leader and designer of Bullet Waste project, here to tell you a word or two about our experience with presenting our game on a conference and how it impacted the way we think about creating this project.

Showtime

Kolejna Konferencja, Bydgoszcz, 13th of April

Let’s start from the end, the conference itself. The day we went there, I was so glad that we made it. It surely has been a long time preparing for this event, but there we were, presenting the second demo of our game to complete strangers, in a different town, giving out leaflets and inviting people to our post where they could play the game.

It was the first time we had done something like that and I must admit, it felt weird. But I’m glad we did it, and I think the whole team agrees it was totally worth it. Also, as we’ve been already working on our new demo the moment we got info about this conference, decision of completing it for this event seemed a natural choice to make. We didn’t know back then how will these preparations look like and how it will impact the way we work with our project. But let’s now go to the beginning.

In the beginning…

Game developement activity club meeting, Poznań, 7th of March

We got a hint about the confrence during a meeting of our university activity club. At first it appeared as a strange idea. We mainly thought about Bullet Waste as our hobby project and we weren’t sure if it was ready to show to others. I guess that if I hadn’t thought “Actually, why not?” the moment I heard about it and wrote down the name of the conference on a piece of paper, we wouldn’t have even discussed going there. That’s because it wasn’t the way we worked till that moment. Fortunately, I decided to give it a try and convinced the rest of the team that it would be a great oportunity to show our game to the players. And so we got a deadline: we had to finish our demo till the 13th of April.

State of the game

Our game was in a quite rough condition the moment we started shaping it into a demo, so we had to work hard to make it playable. While writing this post, I jumped back to the state of our game from the 7th of March to see how it actually looked like back then. It turned out, I had to go 240 commits back. The level was still missing some areas and models, it was running at something around one frame per second, reloading level lasted about a minute and the bullet hell attack system was still in development (yeah, the one the previous post was about).

Working on it…

We focused on completing and polishing things we had in our project, without adding any new features. It took us over a month of intense feature completing, patching and bugfixing. You may think that a month is more than enough for that. Well, I admit I also thought like that. Seems naive when I think of it right now.

The main problem was that the game hasn’t been tested by anyone but the level designer (me) since the last demo. No one even checked when a new functionality came out whether it works in every case and doesn’t blow up others systems. And as it turned out they did, in some cases a whole lot. So we ran intense testing, giving feedback, creating tickets for issues we found and iterated this process.

But while making a game you must still remember that it should not only work, but also be fun to play. That’s why, despite limited time, we asked all testers not only to search for the bugs, but also to specify what they liked and disliked about the gameplay itself. Based on this information we had to choose what we can change in our level or gameplay, and what will take too much time and will have to stay the way it was. Then we implemented the changes, run the tests again to check if they actually helped and the process was repeated.

At the moment we hit the deadline we were aware of some issues, but time had simply run out and we had to ship it. Nonetheless, the game was in a quite good shape and we could show it on the conference without shame.

Go to the players

As we prepared for the event, we realized that without players there is no game. If you want to make a great experience, it has to be regularly tested and reviewed by people that are not working on it. When you keep your project to yourself, you can’t clearly see its issues. It was something that we were doing wrong, shipping one demo for half a year.

That’s why we decided to take more open approach and go to players to gather a small comunity of people interested in our project. We invested in a poster, leaflets and stickers to stand out and be remembered by potential players. We also created a Discord server to post about latest updates of our game and give people space to discuss it. And it was definetly worth it. We got a lot of feedback, both from watching our player’s gameplay and from the players themselves.

Here I’d like to thank all the players that played our demo during that event. The feedback you gave us is very valuable and we can’t wait to forge it into improvement of our game.

What’s next?

Thanks to the conference we released the demo and so we gained a playable version of our game that can be shown to anyone. We definetly want to keep this way, making more frequent patches and updates.

Talking about improving the game, we’ve already had a long discussion about what to do next, based on how the players played our game. We are mainly focusing on combat mechanics and arenas, as they seem too unintuitive and too hard for many players. We’ll be posting some news about it soon.

To sum it up

The thing I’d like to advise you on is that if you’re making something, don’t keep it to yourself during development. Only others can tell you what you are doing wrong and which parts of your creation are its biggest advantages. So don’t be shy and don’t hesitate - go and show others what you have. Even if it’s still in an early stage of developement, people will understand and who knows, maybe they will see potential in your project and decide to help you. You never know unless you try.

That’s it for today. Stay tuned for our next posts!

Gahlammon