We have released our early alpha gameplay trailer!

If you like what you’re seeing, please leave a like and a comment. For sharing, you can find the trailer’s twitter post here and the facebook post here.

And if you’re interested in the thoughts behind making it, check out last week’s post “Does it make sense to make a teaser trailer for an Early Access Game?”.

Meanwhile, besides Indie Dome, we were also selected as one of the 10 finalists for Prémios PlayStation 2017. This is amazing and we’re ecstatic. But, this also means that our strategy of doubling down on the Arcade Mode for events was spot on (Crossroads: Steam Early Access & Arcade Mode for events), because, as part of the finalists, we’ll be showcasing the game at Lisboa Games Week. We’re not sure if this means that we’ll be in 2 spots at the same event, which would be crazy, but we’ll soon know more.

As we stated previously, the Arcade Mode will feature a game flow that’s more convenient for events, with a guest mode taking the spotlight (our Steam Early Access version will mostly rely on your Steam Account).
In addition, we’re preparing the game to be playable with internet access at the event. As Ganbatte is a competitive multiplayer virtual reality game, it is very important to make sure players will be able to enjoy the game regardless the quality of the Internet connection on site, which almost always is unreliable.
This past week our efforts have been mainly geared towards:

• Working on the Arcade Mode (guest system, offline play, event leaderboards)
• Improving player feedback systems

Regarding the feedback systems, we are mainly concerned with the sushi eating interaction and informing the player that his/her plate is in the correct zone in order to be eaten. Our first approach to this challenge was decreasing the opacity of the plate when it reached the mouth area. We initially implemented this feature so that the plate wouldn’t block your vision while close to your face.

From our external playtest (The art of VR playtesting – Ganbatte’s first contact with external testers!), we realised that this wasn’t a good solution, because players didn’t really know if they were able to eat (or not). So, this week we’ve been experimenting with a mixture of:

• Sound
• Visual effects
• Haptics

So far, we haven’t been able to reach the desired feedback for this interaction. Perhaps, once we achieve a satisfactory result, it would be interesting to break down our process and highlight our successes and failures.

We hope that you enjoy your first look at Ganbatte in its early alpha state, and thank you for reading, until next week!

– Daniela