Dare Protoplay

This post was published 6 months 23 days ago and as such, probably does not reflect my current opinion or ability.

Protoplay finished on Sunday, meaning that this year’s Dare to be Digital is over!

Although we didn’t win the competition, we got some great feedback about Pollen and the entire team is really pleased with our completed prototype. All the games produced this year were awesome, and it was nice to finally get a chace to play a lot of them.

It was also brilliant to see kids enjoying the game – especially to see them working their way through puzzles and helping each other choose which kind of bee to use. Even though the prototype took 15-25 minutes for most visitors to play through, almost all of the kids who started playing kept going until the completed the level.

While in general the public and judges told us they liked the idea, visual style and gameplay in Pollen, we found the biggest problem was with controls – gesture recognition using left and right mouse buttons. We’ve recieved a lot of encouragement to try and take the product forward onto Wii, DS, iPhone or through the XNA community which we’d love to do. Finding a control method which is intuitive and fun for every player, especially if we opt to continue using gesture based input, could well be one of our biggest challenges.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who supported us during the 10 weeks – it was a fantastic experience and made a huge difference to me as a developer. We should have final gameplay videos, a copy of the prototype level and a postmortem available soon.