Andrew Stewart’s Kickstarter Campaign for Mable & The Wood has been hitting some snags lately. Last month his PC up and died on him and then this month he learned that the game’s controls just didn’t work. Ahead of an appearance at the upcoming Yorkshire Games Festival, Stewart took his most recent build of Mable & The Wood to an industry meetup. The feedback wasn’t what he expected.
“Nobody, not a single person in the whole pub, got the controls. They just couldn’t work it out. This is death for this kind of game,” Stewart wrote in an update.
Recognizing that a game shouldn’t be hard because of poor design, Stewart quickly began working on a solution. He plans to try out 3 new versions of the controls at the upcoming festival. He’s hoping that one of the new control schemes will keep the game from being “hard in the wrong ways.”
The early playtesting also helped Stewart avoid another development pitfall, excessive effects. “When you’re trying to work out what you need to be paying attention to, it’s just too distracting,” Stewart explained. “This was a big realization because I was planning on adding MORE of this stuff!”
The rest of the update consists of Stewart demonstrating some of the new features and coding added since the playtesting. There were also some new hints about the story behind Mable & The Wood. Including a brief tease of the cult that has summoned Mable at the start of her quest. The ‘Awakened’ enlist Mable’s help to save the world. This sounds very noble of them until you start to realize that they may have had a large part in breaking it in the first place.
So far, Mable & The Wood is still looking towards an early 2017 release date. You can try out the controls for yourself by downloading the demo.
