Hey Reddit! We've been lurking for a long time, but just want to shoutout that this is our first post on Reddit.
We’re a tiny startup game publishing company. We started out by selling prepaid Japanese cards to gamers outside of Japan (we are located in Japan) and eventually pivoted into game publishing after many months of research and customer development. Last year, we went to several gaming events (Tokyo indie fest, Kyoto Bitsummit, Tokyo Game Show) here in Japan to get a feel for the industry and met many great game developers. Along the way we met Henry of Fiery Squirrel and really loved his game Fluff Eaters. Long story short, we partnered up with Henry to see what we could do to get his game out to the world!
In late January we (a team of 5 people) flew to San Antonio, Texas to showcase Fluff Eaters at PAX South 2016. It was an awesome event and our game was very well received by people who visited our booth. The game is visually inspired by “Cut the Rope” and mechanically by the the classic game of “Jacks”; where players bounce the ball, pick up the jacks then catch the ball again.
It was easy for us to explain to people how to play the game, since we were physically there to guide them on how the game works. After people learned how to play they got very addicted and fell in love with it. That’s great! However, we can’t always be there in person to teach people how to play the game. This is where our biggest challenge has come to surface; teaching people how to play the game when we’re not there!
Henry had a tutorial made for the game before we met him, but we all thought it could be better. After observing hundreds of people play the game, we sat down at a table and wrote a list of ideas on how to improve the tutorial and how to better understand the basic mechanics. We narrowed down the best ideas and over the last several months Henry has implemented the changes.
We thought our improvements would definitely help users understand the game play. However, after going out on the streets and having random people play our game with zero explanation from us on how to play, the users were still having a hard time trying to understand the game play. Some of them had no idea what was going on at all! Obviously this is pretty frustrating for us after a lot of time and effort was put into improving this aspect of the game.
That is why we are doing this post, we want the reddit community to help us with the tutorial. Please check out the game and let us know what you think. It is free to play and of course we’re open to any suggestions you may have. We’ve been working long and hard on Fluff Eaters and it would be great to get some fresh eyes and perspectives on the game. Take a look, comment and of course feel free to ask us any questions you may have!
Link to our game: http://ift.tt/1TjGwoo
Submitted May 20, 2016 at 12:05PM
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