We had an amazing time at the Orlando October Indienomicon meetup. It was incredible to have so many people publicly try Soar Beyond, and really was a dream come true. There was almost an overwhelming amount of feedback and it will definitely drive some changes to the game. Nothing can ever replace having people go hands on, and it is so difficult to do, especially people who haven’t tried it before. After all, once you know, you know, and that means you can’t give the new player perspective.
Prepping for the demo was a lot of work, but so rewarding. Some obvious but difficult things like making sure you can get your hands on enough working computers, keyboards, mice, etc. (you’d be surprised how hard that can be). But also making it exciting for those who visit with cool decorations, a fun online leaderboard, cool things to put on the displays when no one is playing. Not to mention surveys, feedback questions, printed instructions.
So what did we learn from this? Well, we are doing a lot to reduce overload by splitting out reports, making routes easier to select, and adding a hint system in to call out common new player mistakes. Player discovery is a core part of the game, and it can be very easy to automate the fun and discovery out, so this is always a balancing act.
My way of balancing this is first time tips that warn when a route is full (try flying more, raising prices, using bigger planes) or empty, advice on first route frequency, warnings about when you should expand your presence into more cities, etc. I’ve already got the first versions of these in for the quick games but need to do versions for full games where everything is unlocked. That’s a challenge because the quick games are designed for progressive feature unlock where full games give you the power to (try) anything from the start, like a real CEO.
But that is jumping ahead. It was just an incredible milestone to see real people sitting at my game, and the event was such a blast!