Puzzle Gaiden Gets Neglected

Well, hopefully this isn't a terribly depressing .plan, but it will feel good for me to get this off of my chest.

I have recently done a tiny bit of rethinking on Puzzle Gaiden, and I've decided to take the emphasis on the game's story almost completely out. All of the RPG and strategy elements remain, but the big story had to be removed. It was just too much work - it had to be scaled down and the story was the most ripe for the plucking.

I've also gotten a lot of feedback about the game. What have I learned? A VERY major, important lesson - people hate reading text tutorials. They hate it. Even if it's just a couple of minutes of reading, they absolutely don't want to do it. Even if they find they don't understand the game without reading it. They will stop playing the game altogether before they read the tutorial. That's just the way it turns out.

This was very unexpected for me. I was totally blind sided. The solution is of course simple, but also labor-intensive. If you want someone to go through a tutorial, you better make it three things - interactive, relavent to their current scene in the game, and quick. You can't just unload the entire game's tutorial on the player at once at the very beginning, You've got to give it to them in digestible chunks and have the tutorial teach only how to do the current task at hand.

So, that's a lot to do - especially for an indie. But it's what must be done - no way around it.

So, that's all great and fine and dandy, but the current problem with Puzzle Gaiden is that it's suffering from a large degree of neglect. Unfortunately, between contract work, college, and the game itself, I just don't have time for everything. I have had to basically put one of these three things on the back burner, and PG was it.

So that's bad. The gut-wrenching thing is that PG is sooooo close to being finished. All it need is one more big push to make it out. But it won't get it, at least not any time soon. It's like being half-way through giving birth, but not having time to finish.

So what's this .plan all about? Well, lamentation I s'pose, and me intellectually coming to grips with the reality of it. Unfortunately, it's ixnay on the icturespay on this one. I guess I should at least be happy to be working in the games industry and going to school... Eventually I'll be done with college and I'll have a lot more free time then. I just have to make it. But I REALLY don't want to wait two more semesters before being able to start finishing PG....

....

But I guess I have no choice.