Hi everybody. I’ve been taking a bit of a break from programming while I wait for playtesters to play through the game and give us their suggestions. We’ve received some good suggestions so far for things that we can tweak to make the game even better (mostly about areas that are too hard or too easy), but I’d like to wait for a few more people to give it a try before updating the game. Interestingly enough, my 9-year old daughter has ended up really liking the game. She played it for about 3 hours yesterday and not at my behest (I even made her get off at one point and she asked to play it some more later on). When I asked her if she liked it and why, she said that it was funny and easy. Now funny, I understood – even though she’s not going to get the obscure RPG references, she obviously is enjoying the other jokes – but easy surprised me because I had seen her die MANY times. With some further questioning, it turned out what she meant was that it was faster paced than most RPGs she had experienced. For example, with Blue Dragon, it can often take an hour or two just to finish a single dungeon, that may or may not advance the story in any real way. Final Fantasy XIII is even worse. Contrast that with our game where the whole thing is only supposed to last a few hours and that sort of pacing obviously won’t work -we had to speed things up a bit, to the game’s great benefit (nobody likes slow and plodding).

Speaking of length, the first playtester to go through the game (besides myself, obviously) said it took him about 5 hours to reach the final boss so it looks like we hit our time estimate.

In other news, I just discovered how easy it is to publish stuff for the Kindle. I think I’ll put my two previous games (Epiphany in Spaaace! and Molly the Were-Zompire) up there for $1 a piece – they’re already basically e-books so why not sticking them on an actual e-book reader?