Release the smallest playable thing, they said…

Get it in front of people and gather feedback, they said…

As somebody that has written code for almost their entire life, and is working as a professional software developer for almost a decade now, I do not doubt the wisdom of this advice. What I realized, however, is that sticking to the first part of the advice doesn’t necessarily result in the second part being successful. It’s something that I really should’ve see coming, but somehow still managed to get surprised by.

After having released the first prototype for my game, which was indeed pretty much the smallest playable thing I felt could demonstrate the concept I’m going for, I do find myself with as much feedback as I can count by the fingers of one hand. I was not hoping for rave reviews or anything. If anything, getting detailed reviews would have been a clear sign that I waited much too long with a first release. But I was hoping for a bit more that would allow me to assess the feasibility of the concept.

Now, this is not supposed to become a rant about how unfair the universe is. Quite the contrary, I have much to be grateful for. Rather, I’ll try to summarize the experience, and try to draw some conclusions. The result may be helpful for other people going through the same process, or may be helpful to myself by prompting some people to comment and point out things that I may have missed. So let’s get into this.

Showing it to the family

Having an actual family that is not into gaming to an almost incredible degree, my first announcements were on the two forums on the net where I am a regular participant and kind of a known quantity, as well as some direct channels to friends who I thought might want to take a look at it. This actually resulted in a higher amount of views and even downloads of the project than I had expected during the first two days. But not as much feedback as I’d have hoped. There were a couple of people that left a comment, which were helpful, especially the one pointing out a rather severe bug. However, only one person seemed to really engage with the game and tell me what they liked and, most importantly, what they didn’t. Which is of course the most valuable part of early feedback.

Initially I had intended to leave it at that for maybe a month or so, maybe iron out some things, before making a wider announcement to try and get some more. But what I had was overall too little to really go on. I had one piece of really valuable feedback, but only from one person. Certainly not enough to formulate a future plan on. I felt I needed more before nailing down any future milestones.

The silence of the web

So I took the bit of courage together that I had and moved early into a phase I had dreaded. I sought out places where I could announce my project more broadly. Maybe the game was just crap, but people on the forums where I was a participant just didn’t have the heart to tell me. That would be painful, but invaluable to know none the less. The first place on the list was obviously the itch forums, where I felt that I probably was in good company, seeing that this is kind of one of the things itch is made for. And then it was off… to reddit! After realising that r/DestroyMyGame was only for videos, and that a video was definitely the completely wrong way to present my game in this state, I went over to r/playtesters. With the reputation that reddit generally has I felt more like throwing my baby to the wolves than anything else, but I figured once I filter through the trolls there would be some useful feedback there none the less. I also figured that it might be easier for people to give feedback if they just had to click a button instead of typing something out, so I went and made a feedback form for them to click their opinion on.

The next two days were where it finally dawned on me that I’m probably doing something wrong. The reddit post had over 300 views, so I had definitely posted in the right place for people to see the announcement. This translated to… 3 views to the games page? I know that a 10% conversion rate (even for visits, not talking about downloads, and much less about actual feedback) is really good, but less than 1% seemed a bit on the low end. Also, no comments in the thread. No comments on the announcement thread on itch. No comments on the games community page itself. After some more spreading around, and a week of time, I have a whole 3 clicks on my feedback form (though especially one of them again extremely valuable).

Analysing the feedback that I have

Meanwhile, I did receive a bit more feedback from personal friends in verbal form. Taking all the feedback together, it was actually pretty encouraging: The core loop was solid and showed promise. Most important for engagement with the game going forward was considered variety and world interaction, which was honestly not where I was going to put my priorities first. I thought most important would be fiddling with and extending the core mechanics until the bit of game that was there felt truly fun. But the general consensus seemed to be that it is fun, it just gets old real quick if the context in which you’re doing things always stays the same. It’s an assumption based on awfully little overall feedback, obviously, but it seems a reasonable one. So already the release of the prototype has completely changed my development priorities for the next couple months.

It has also changed it in other ways than just what was suggested by the little feedback I received. And that brings me back to my little jab at the “golden rule for gamedevs” at the beginning of this post.

Interpreting the absence of feedback

True to that rule, I had built the smallest playable thing that I felt would be representative of the concept I was going for. Coming from backend development, and suffering a rather severe case of design blindness on top of that, that didn’t include any sensory stimuli as far as I was concerned. The prototype doesn’t look outright horrible (like, you don’t get eye cancer like from a 90ies webpage or something like that), but it certainly doesn’t look appealing. There’s no sound either, and much less any kind of background graphics that could bring flavour to the table. All of that also means that any kind of video presentation is completely off the table, and apparently those are considered very important nowadays - another fact I wasn’t aware off before this, as my own choice of games is much more influenced by text and still screenshots rather than a video.

But considering that my announcements were actually seen by enough people (more than I had aimed for initially), and that this didn’t translate to enough people actually taking a look at the game, I can only conclude that this means something along the lines of “I might have given it a look if I would have seen something more exciting than a screenshot of a boring gray screen”. Not all of them, obviously. but almost certainly some of them. It’s also something I have now seen over and over again when reading comments on r/DestroyMyGame on other projects: Looks boring, make it look more interesting.

So, if I take that golden rule today, I would actually extend it slightly: “Build the smallest playable thing you can, then make it look interesting (not necessarily beautiful or stunning or anything, just… not boring), then get it in front of people to gather feedback.” For people coming into games from an artistic background, this might be implied. Having the game look interesting is probably part of their definition of “smallest playable thing”. For a backend developer, that’s not obvious at all.

And so, a presentable UI and sound have crawled their way up the priority list rather a lot earlier than expected. It’s not efficient, purely from a development point of view. It’s annoying from my own personal point of view, where these things are a) more like afterthoughts and b) not something I’m good at. But the problem is that I don’t think I should continue in this void of feedback for much longer. I may be an experienced software developer, but I don’t really have any experience with game development. Apart from some three years I wasted creating a prototype that was not this one, that just didn’t come together and never even saw the light of day, because just writing working code is not guaranteed to actually produce fun gameplay. I have no intention of repeating that mistake.

And so, I think it will be more productive in the long run if some expediency makes way to accommodate for human psychology. My interpretation here might be completely wrong, obviously. It’s possible that people didn’t donate me their time to play my prototype for completely different reasons than just “looks boring”. Without feedback, it’s impossible to know. But it’s at least probable, and I have to try something. “Noone seems to care, so the project is probably doomed” would certainly seem like a less valid conclusion this early in development.

Plans for the future

I have spent the two weeks since the initial release planning further milestones, fixing the couple most egregious issues pointed out to me and laying some foundations in the code to expedite development in the directions that were suggested by the feedback that I received.

The first major focus will be on getting at least one more job type in there as soon as possible, which will differ significantly in structure from the current delivery jobs, introduce the final planned character stat (vitality) and extra-vehicular activity and be more along the lines of “high risk/high reward” rather than “dependable but unspectacular income”, which is clearly where the current delivery jobs fall on the spectrum. I’ll also set some time aside to start elementary worldbuilding, but none of that will see actual introduction to the game for a couple of months. Not before I nail down a core concept of how I want factions and characters to actually work, and that’s pretty much an empty sheet on the drawing board right now.

But apart from that I’ll also be working on sound and UI on the sidelines, in the hopes of having the thing in a more presentable state in at least 6 months. Which is a bit ambitious given the time I currently have to spend on the project, but in my estimation not completely out there. I really hadn’t planned to invest heavily into those things this early in development, but the current feedback is just a bit on the scarce side to risk basing my priorities for the next one to two years on. I’ll need more feedback, and the way I figure it right now, to get more of that I need to make this thing have a bit more flash.

I’m also hoping that time, and consistency, will be a factor to get more people to give the prototype a go. This is the first post about the state of development, and I intend to do one of these every month going forward. I hope to be able to release updates at a similar interval, but sometimes it’s just not practical to cut things apart in order to be able to have an intermediary release. We’ll see how high I can keep the frequency.

As such, I’m signing off for the moment and get back to all the many things on my backlog that are yelling at me to pick them up. I’ll see you in orbit, in about a month at the latest. If anybody is interested in getting a word in with me before that, do not hesitate to use the community section of the project!