Now from the outset, I don’t claim to be anywhere near the levels of even thinking I could be too big for anyone to review or play my games. Even if I ever were successfully enough to consider myself “big” I am someone who genuinely believes we should never consider ourselves better simply due to circumstance and opportunity. With that being said the point of today’s post is something that I think can apply to any developer no matter how big or small, but also goes beyond that to something I think we could all do to consider.
Once I’d started to promote Glo and put it on certain distribution sites I started to get a nice flow of requests for Steamkeys to review/play the game. Amongst these requests were many scammers. Most of them were obvious as they came from huge name YouTubers and Twitchers asking for plenty of keys to give to their loyal followers. It’s pretty easy to spot these a mile off and a quick google of the real email addresses makes for short work clearer out the bogus requests. Apart from these scam requests the majority of the requests came from websites or YouTubers that ranked low on the “Reach” rating on the site I was using (dodistribute.com). Upon checking them out some of the YouTubers only had followers in the low hundreds if that and some of the sites were ones I hadn’t really heard of with what looked like not a lot of activity in their comments section. These requests were 100% legit and from hard working journalists and YouTubers with a passion for what they do but just didn’t have the highest of numbers. At this point a lot of people may deny those requests, but honestly I was stoked that anyone wanted a copy in the first place! I mean it’s my first PC game ever and I didn’t really know if anyone would be interested outside of my close circle. Furthermore some of the requests were from foreign outlets which I hadn’t originally considered in my marketing but also the game doesn’t have any localisation yet. Again I’m assuming a lot of people would bother giving out a free copy of their game in these circumstances but like I said the more people that wanted to play the better.
I sent out copies to all those that seemed legit and had some very grateful emails in return letting me know how excited they were to check the game out. Over the next week a couple of YouTube videos came out and I loved watching every minute of them. It’s exhilarating to see someone play your game and describe their feelings towards it! I also had a couple of nice email conversations as well. However the real reward came shortly after the PLAY Expo.
During the Expo a player stumbled upon a pretty huge bug. It was to do with the vertical moving platforms and affected a large amount of levels. With only a week left before the release, this was a literal game breaker and although I had an idea of what was going on I wasn’t sure if I could fix it in time. At the very least it would require some long nights trying to figure out something I thought I’d already cracked. Whilst I was sorting out some of the minor fixes someone messaged me on Twitter to see if they could ask a few questions for a review they were doing. It turned out to be one of the keys I’d given to a foreign site. The question was if you are meant to die instantly on level 74… absolutely not! I knew for a fact this shouldn’t be happening as played that level in testing and it was fine. But sure as hell when I loaded it up you instantly died over and over and over again! The poor guy had been trying his hardest to figure out this impossible conundrum but it was in fact a bug. Now first of all massive thanks goes out for contacting me and asking rather than going ahead and writing a review of a broken game. Anyway I let him know that it was in fact a bug and I would fix it ASAP. After about 5 mins of investigating it immediately dawned on me that whilst editing the main player sprite I’d inadvertently moved the centre point by one pixel. This meant that the player was always spawning one pixel too high, which didn’t matter in other levels but did in this particular one. A quick change and it was fixed… and then I thought, the vertical platform collisions use maths which are based on specific pixel amounts! If the pixel centre of the character has been fixed maybe that has corrected the platform bug… it did! 😀 A quick round of testing and the bug was nowhere to be seen! What I thought was going to be a job over many nights turned into a five minute fix. Who knows what kind of rabbit holes I may have ended up in if I had tried to change the algorithms etc. All thanks to the feedback from that one reviewer.
The moral of the story is you never know how others might be able to help you out. A particular reviewer or YouTuber may not appear to have a huge following to promote your game but that is not the only thing they can bring to the table. Another person playing you game is another player who can help you make it better. Especially one who is going to play it as in depth as a reviewer will.