Feedback on Iomante
So people have now played chapter 2, and overall the feedback been very positive. People actually laughed at our jokes! It’s a good feeling.
We released chapter two of Iomante on the 21st of May, and re-released chapter one in the process as anyone that played it when we first published it would have forgotten about it by now. Chapter 1 lived on trrrm.com until I took that down, so it was moved to helm108 at the same time that chapter 2 was released. We decided to share Iomante on Facebook first to see what sort of feedback we might get, and new friends since 2013 meant fresh eyes on our work that did result in some useful responses.
Changes that have been made since the 21st:
- Added a link to chapter two when you finish chapter one. I know, really obvious.
- Put analytics into both so we can see how far people actually get and where they stop playing. Also obvious.
- Added a rewind function so that if you reach an ending that results in your death, you can go back to where you made that decision and see the rest of the story without starting from the beginning.
- Fast Mode. If you return to a page you’ve already read, the entire page displays instantly instead of showing line by line.
Feedback from a few people had been that replaying the game after reaching a death ending is quite frustrating, as you have to wait for text you’ve already read to be delivered quite slowly. The pacing works well on the first playthrough but after that it becomes an annoyance, so the combination of the rewind function and fast mode should make the game a much smoother experience.
Fact
Adding analytics became an interesting adventure. I’d put Google Analytics on the page, but hadn’t integrated anything into the actual game. Based on our timed playthroughs the average visit duration indicated that a lot of people weren’t finishing chapter two, but as we didn’t have any hard data to support that I modified the game code to send a pageview event with a custom dimension of the name of the current page. This is a bit of a shotgun approach, but I’m hoping that I can build reports in GA that will give us some useful information.
I’ve never used custom dimensions before in GA, so just to be sure we had useful information I also added some standard custom events for specific pages and actions. Between these two things we’ll be able to see where people drop off, and hopefully this information will guide us when writing the third chapter.
Opinion
When we started writing chapter two we decided to create with a rough outline of the story before we dug deeper into it. This seemed sensible, but we were conscious that chapter one was written in one day with no real plan in mind other than “something about a bear and a shack.” People liked chapter one, and we were concerned that by changing our methodology we might end up with an inferior product, but throughout writing we found we were changing things on the fly so much that we almost completely abandoned our original plan for where the story was going to go.
Even so, the pacing for parts of the story was much slower than in chapter one, and some feedback that we got was that parts of chapter two weren’t as concise as chapter one and rambled on a bit. Precisely what we’d hoped wouldn’t happen. There is something to be said for having a deadline.
Sharing with the rest of the world
Now that the technical issues have been dealt with, we’re going to attempt to fix the wordiness of chapter two and then share the game on Reddit. Hopefully we can find some part of Reddit where people care about things like this!