To say nothing of the gamer response of course – Introversion made a sequel? Scandalous! HOW DARE THEY?
In fact, I’d bet Multiwinia is simultaniously all of these things:
- Our most commercial game
- Our first sequel, therefore our least original game
- Our first console game
- Our largest game so far
- Our most accessable game
- Our worst reviewed game
- Our biggest selling game
- The most fun to play of all of our games
Mark summed it up best recently when he said Multiwinia wasn’t a “Chris Delay” game – it was an Introversion game. The first Introversion game. That’s exactly how it feels to me – this game is bigger than any one of us, with a list of participants including pretty much everyone who’s ever worked for us, going all the way back to the Future War tech demos myself and Andy Bainbridge put together in 2002.
As part of making Multiwinia “Our most accessable game”, we’ve recently been doing some usability testing in the Omega Sektor in Birmingham - the same venue as the Defcon Grand Final event. A LAN centre as big as Omega is the ideal place to grab volunteers who are experienced gamers but who aren’t familiar with our own games, and aren’t Introversion fans (ie, they aren’t forgiving of mistakes and problems, which is what you want). The aim of a Usability Test is to watch those people try to play our games, and see how they get on, and from that make improvements. The very first usability test we ever participated in was dropped on us without warning by Valve while we were visiting them – they took the early build of Defcon that we’d supplied, and got one of their guys to play it while we watched on a big TV (and squirmed). You have to sit in silence while your test subject completely fails to comprehend your game, and totally fails to complete any significant objectives. Then you accept it’s your fault, not his. Interface designs that seem completely obvious during development often cause huge problems for new players, and you’re able to see very quickly what most peoples first ten minutes of the game experience will be like. You then make changes, redesign your interface and help and tutorials, and the game gets better, more accessable, and hence more fun and more popular.
You also lose a lot of the quirks of your game. A system like gesture recognition to summon new units from Darwinia would _never_ have made it through usability testing – there’s no way we’d have been able to to watch as people squirmed and fought with it, many of whom would certainly have given up in disgust. I’ve no doubt Darwinia would have shipped with on-screen icons if we’d run usability tests before launch. And I don’t honestly know if that’s a good thing or not. In the end, Darwinia survives the removal of gesture recognition intact, meaning the gestures were not a crucial part of the game, but they were a part of its charm and quirkyness and originality. And it’s only a small step before Usability Testing becomes Gameplay Testing, in which quirky gameplay ideas are self-censored in favour of mainstream normality in order to widen the audience and deapen the pockets. It’s a slipperly slope, down which we all must eventually slide.
I’m only being semi-serious, of course. People have accused us of forfeiting our indie status since Darwinia, and that will continue for as long as we make games. The last bullet point on that list above pretty much makes all the previous ones irrelevent, so long as it turns out to be true. If Multiwinia does cause us to be thought of differently then that’s fine, and the total head-fuck that is Subversion will soon set any journalists straight about Introversion “Going Mainstream”.
Back at the Omega Sektor, we played through all of the existing game modes with our volunteer testers, and generally speaking the day was a big success. Most of the team was there in person – myself, Mark, Johnny, Gary and Leander. We split the test up into 2 player games and 4 player games, depending on how many people were waiting in line, and we had one Introversion guy watching each player, asking questions at key points like “What do you think your objective is?” and “How do you intend to win this game?”. After each game we’d ask “Why do you think you won/lost” and “What will you do differently next time”, then we got them to play the exact same game again on the exact same level, looking to see what they’d actually learnt. We also had a ton of very positive comments about the game, and watching four totally new players laughing and jeering at each other while they played was very rewarding. Some of our testers came back hours after their test with new friends, asking to play again so they could show the game to their mates. All good signs.
I now have about 20 pages of notes from the six hour test, some good, some not so good, but all extremely useful stuff. The challenge now is to subtly redesign the game so people don’t get frustrated in the same ways – to make the game as easy to get into as possible, without changing the underlying gameplay. I’m confident it can be done.
One final note. Can anybody believe this was only a year ago?
I'm not much of a multiplayer guy and Defcon was too hardcore for me but I'm really looking forward to Darwinian multiplayer battles...
