Last week I attended Game Anglia Festival, an event where indie developers, studios and students could submit their games to be played by the public. I submitted it by giving them a download of the game and a gameplay video (in case they weren't able to play it for whatever reason), and they thankfully let me showcase it at the event! In this post I'll briefly go over what that experience was like - the equipment and materials I brought, prior play-testing, what I learnt from watching people play, and my overall takeaways from it.

The Setup

I had 3 setups available for people to play on - a laptop, a PC, and a Steamdeck. The monitor at the top acted as a nice little poster with some gameplay in the background.

Having 3 setups meant that people were less pressured for time and could get immersed in the game, while still having a decent number of people playing over the whole 4 hour event. This worked even better than I expected, with most people getting 20-30 minutes into it before finding a good place to stop and have a look at the other games in the show (shout-out to the one person that finished the entire demo, taking over an hour).

Getting in touch

Almost all of my time at the event was spent chatting with the attendees and other developers, so I wanted to make sure that we'd keep each-other's contact information. You might notice that small business cards are dotted about on the table, and that was my simple strategy to do that. It contained a QR code to a carrd site, and links to my social media and this blog.

Interestingly, Itch (the site where I uploaded my demo) has analytics that are able to tell me which sites people came from, and thus how effective different avenues were. I'm no marketing analyst, but I think that leaning into the host site itself seems like a good idea for now.

Most of the visits came from people coming from my Itch profile, looking around the 'newest games' page, and other similar searches related to the tags. These numbers might look unimpressive, but I'm currently at the point where the small steps are significant; I want to get as many people playing it as I can! This brings us to the next topic:

Play-testing

One of the things I was looking forward to in the event was getting the opportunity to watch so many people play the game. Before the event, play-testing had been limited to a handful of people that I knew. Despite myself apparently being a 'solo developer', their input has considerably shaped the game, and I was sure that the people playing at the event would offer similarly valuable insight. In order to make the best use of this insight, I wanted to make the game as accessible as I could manage. To that end, I found the final boss: Mum.

Having zero experience with video games, she couldn't rely on common 'gamer knowledge' whatsoever. This changed how she interacted with it a lot. The most important change I made after she played it was re-wording the tutorial text to be more concise and specific, which seemed to help people during the showcase as well. People are smart! This means that your choice of words is important. Ultimately, I don't think that my changes made the game accessible to my mum - maybe one day, but the concept of platformer games was just too alien to her. I hope that these adjustments helped, though.

Letting the player know in exactly what state they can wall-jump seemed to help.

What I learnt from watching

• I should add tutorial diagrams which make it clearer what certain actions should look like, as well has helping those with dyslexia or other reading difficulties.
• There were certain sections where people consistently struggled. Being stuck isn't inherently a bad thing, but there were times where I was asking more of them than they had been taught by the game because of some slightly ill-considered level designing.
• At the same time, slightly ill-considered level designs can be fun to play! Micro-managing the player's expectations can hinder the fun experience of playing a game, because people enjoy finding their own solutions to problems. Games are to be "played", after all (at least this one is).
• I should add a prompt to the map, so that players know they can scroll it about. 
• Lots of other tweaks, balance adjustments and a couple of bugfixes that I'll spare you the details of.

There's plenty of work cut out for me, so my next step is figuring out my priorities. Besides my work directly on the game, I'd like to post about it more often to gain as much traction as I can on social media. I also need to work on porting it to Mac and Linux, as well as creating a Steam page. There's a lot to do besides making the game itself...

As a little final note I'd like to add a thank you to the couple of people that came along to the event with me to help, it wouldn't have been possible without them. Also a thank you to the judges for giving Valerie the "Best Indie Game" award at the event! I even got a little trophy!

Thanks for taking your time to read! If this post was interesting to you, please check out the free demo of Valerie, the game I'm working on right now.

I have various socials, too:
Twitter - @Jole_says_hi
Bluesky - @Jole_says_hi