Matt Glanville

Switch ‘N’ Shoot @ GameCity 10

I just spent 2 days demoing Switch ‘N’ Shoot at GameCity 10. It’s an awesome, friendly and inclusive event that’s going on for the rest of the week at the National Videogames Arcade in Nottingham. I highly recommend visiting and checking out some awesome games and meeting some lovely people!

Switch ‘N’ Shoot seemed to go down very well among boys, girls, women, men and all in-between. I had it set up with a single, big, glowing button made by my friend Nick, which definitely helped to pique peoples’ interest and was a lot of fun for kids to mash.

I noticed a few problems with the design which I’ll be addressing in forthcoming builds. Overall I was very happy with how quickly people got the hang of it (kids seemed to take to it far more quickly than adults, which was a nice surprise) but there are some kinks that could be smoothed out.

The main one being that the whole power-up system is not as clear as it could be:

• Firstly, several people didn’t realise that the power-up tokens would upgrade their weapons. Some thought it was a health bonus because it’s a big plus symbol, while others thought it was a dangerous bullet or mine (makes sense; it falls down just like aliens do, and it’s got spiky prongs and looks a bit like a crosshair). I want to create a new sprite that’s a little more inviting.
  
• Secondly, it’s not obvious that missing subsequent power-ups will downgrade your weapon. This can be learned through experience, but it would be nice if it was a little more intuitive. I don’t think the little yellow minus sign that pops up is obvious enough.
  
• Finally, no one knew that working your way to the top tier weapon would hyperdrive to the next sector. This is partly down to the difficulty; the game is a little harder to play with the big button than it is with a mouse button or standard keyboard keys, so not many people reached the hyperdrive without being told to aim for it. Maybe some kind of visual indicator would be good, like a vertical weapon power bar or something?? Not sure I want to clutter up the screen any more though, it’s nice having it really minimal.
  

Joonas, Tuuka and Niilo aiming for high scores.

The other issues I noticed aren’t too surprising, and definitely things I want to address:

• The menu system is pretty unintuitive. Having to press and hold the button to select options just doesn’t seem to come too naturally and most people got it wrong before they got it right.
  
• This is even worse on Android, where people just want to tap the icons. I think I’ll bite the bullet and make touch-screen devices just allow a standard ‘touch to activate’ system, rather than fight peoples’ deeply-ingrained expectations.
• Similarly, a lot of people accidentally quit out to the main menu by holding the button too long on game over, when all they wanted to do was retry. This seemed to be more common with children, who would tend to slam down the button and keep it held down.
• Most people seemed surprised that aliens would wait at the bottom for a little while, and expected them to continue off-screen.
• There’s a bunch of work I want to do on the audio to give it more oomph and hook in additional sound events for power-up spawning and the like.

So nothing too concerning but it’s nice to have some confirmation of what’s working and what’s not. Generally, I am really pleased with players’ response to the game. I’ll be addressing these issues over the coming weeks as I continue to work towards alpha (so close now!!).

You can grab these pre-release updates for free on itch.io. If you like Switch ‘N’ Shoot please give it a vote on Steam Greenlight, and you want to see all updates you can follow me on Twitter: @crowbarska.