Plan for Jay Barnson

Big Demo on the 19th - Stress Level Hits Roof.

The good news is that if lack of motivation was ever a problem on our team, it ain't now. We have a big press demo scheduled a week from Saturday... but we have to get the demo READY by Tuesday. This last weekend I quit working on getting the game "feature complete" to focus on debugging and polishing the subset of the game that will be in the demo. Which isn't too bad - the game is mainly missing 'spit and polish' features at this point, plus some of the special-case level logic for the latter half of the single-player campaign game.

But the Void War demo has me simultaneously thrilled and terrified. Since this is my first indie game, I'm acutely aware that this game doesn't have the AAA production values I'm used to working with. I don't have a three million dollar budget, and most of my team are working on their first game. What we do have is a very focused, and unique gameplay experience... 3D Space dogfighting action. It's all about making the 1-on-1 dogfight interesting and skill-based, and then scaling that experience for many-versus-many battles. I hope the folks at the demo will be looking at it from that perspective! Even if they are, though, I'm still having nightmares of the game crashing horribly on EVERY journalist's machine, or we're just gonna lose power when the demo happens, or... well, SOMETHING.

So... anybody have suggestions for managing press expectations with an indie game? How about just general ideas for preparing a press demo? It's been YEARS since I've done this, and I've never been *in charge* of it before. I've got one week to get this demo ready, and aside from fixing bugs and eliminating the most jarring 'idiosynchracies' of the design, I'm not sure what I should give priority to.