As soon as we heard about MineCon we knew we had to go and support the indie juggernaut that is Minecraft in its grandiose release. Before going much further I want to take this chance to thank everyone involved with MineCon and everyone that attended MineCon for supporting us. Markus, Daniel, Lydia, Christine, all of the other developers, and many more really welcomed us with open arms. We felt very at home with you all and the whole event was just a fantastic showing of community strength that surrounds indie games as a whole.
We applied to show off Octodad through the MineCon website and a few months later we found out that we were accepted to showcase the game in the expo hall at the “Indie Theater”.
Continue reading after the break!
At first I thought this meant we would just take the game there like GDC or many of the other conventions and show it off to people in the same fashion as we had before. Now this by itself would have been great and an amazing opportunity. We’re always looking to get the game out to as many people as we possibly can. One of the cool things about Octodad is that there’s really no limit to who it can be enjoyed by. I’ve seen older parents have fun with it, and yet at the same time I’ve also seen four year old kids also have a blast flopping around with the dad.
The cool thing about MineCon is that we also had the opportunity to give a short little talk on basically whatever we wanted right in the middle of the expo hall next to all of the other indie game booths of our brethren. We decided that this would be as good a time as any to start showing off some early gameplay from Octodad 2! We set out to create our presentation to introduce those who had not heard of Octodad before to the loving father that we all know, and brief them in preparation for our Octodad 2 unveil. It took about two weeks from concept to finish to form our talk into something we thought represented us and the new game as a whole. Up until this point our talks had been things thrown together at the last moment or “done live” due to our lack of time and us not knowing we were even going to be giving a talk until only a day or so prior to the event.
I’ll be writing another shorter post on the actual presentation itself and hopefully also making it available to you all in case you’re interested in seeing it.
In short the presentation went off without a hitch and everyone really seemed to enjoy the bit of the new game that I played for them live at the talk. I ended up showing off our new tutorial level in which you’re at Octodad’s wedding. In the level you have to get from your dressing room to the alter while avoiding various perils and readying yourself for Scarlet your bride to be. All the seats of the presentation ended up being filled to my delight. I wasn’t sure if anyone would end up showing up and it was great to see that people were actually quite interested.
What was truly fantastic about MineCon for us was the varying ages of the attendees. Up until now we hadn’t been able to get many younger player’s feedback on the game. (At least not in person.) MineCon was almost all kids 5 to 14 years old and this helped us to great extent in realizing what was/wasn’t working for us as far as things like jokes go. Another interesting thing we found is that many kids actually came up and just picked up the controls for the game as if it was no big deal. I found this particularly interesting because I’ve had a theory for a long time now that the reason seasoned gamers generally have a harder time playing Octodad is that they’re stuck in their ways as far as how a game “should” control.
Yes the game definitely has it’s flaws and we’ve been working really hard to try ironing those out, but a lot of what keeps people from learning the game is that they’re very used to how a normal 3rd person action/adventure game controls. Younger kids seem very open to something new and don’t have many pre-conceived notions of how a game should work or play. I believe that’s part of why they naturally pick up the game more quickly than others from different age groups. Now this doesn’t necessarily apply to everyone, but I think it’s pretty accurate overall. I had a feeling that this was the case for a while, but MineCon basically proved it.
Another great thing is that kids are generally a lot more honest when it comes to giving feedback. They aren’t as worried about hurting your feelings or sharing theirs when they play something. They came right out and told us what they did and didn’t like. THIS IS SO REFRESHING! Usually you have to almost fish for feedback with playtesters so this was a breath of fresh air for us.
We ended up with a ton of great feedback that will really help us in making the game we want to deliver to you all in good time.
I really hope that there’s another MineCon next year as well so we can attend with a hopefully fully “finished” Octodad 2 to share with everyone. Sadly since we were kind of consumed with getting our booth in working order we didn’t get much of a chance to check out the other great panels and things the convention had to offer, but we’d like to come back to see that side of MineCon next time.Thank you to everyone who came by to play the game! We will hopefully have some more swag to give away next time, but it was great to see some of you strutting around in your fancy new Octodad t-shirts.
– <3 Phil