Thanks to all of those gamers who played And Then There Was One at AVCon. We took note of your feedback over the weekend and plan to use it in improving the game. In particular we intend to:
- Use vibration and sound notifications during the player reveal part of the game
- Fix bug that occurred when players were revealed while feigning their death
- Ensure that replays work when there are more than two human players
- Prevent player flickering when sorting draw order
- Fix bug in which controller would not stop vibrating
The weekend also allowed us to observe different strategies. Several players thought that the best way to play was to not kill your targets at all and keep an eye out for other players killing their. This strategy is effective against beginner players because they aren't familiar enough with the game to properly conceal their kills. However it fails against more experienced players as they can more easily conceal their kills, fake their death and hide using other people in the crowd or the environment. In fact more experienced players would kill most of their targets forcing the idle players to become more aggressive and hence prone to reveal themselves. So in this sense the targets move the game forward by allowing players to apply pressure to the other players.
Another strategy was to seek out players using the vibration feature. Players would move through the crowds waiting for a vibration in the controller. This would indicate that another player is near. When the controller would vibrate players would then hone their attention to the space around them. Moving closer/further away from other crowd members to verify if they were another player. This is a very slow and drawn out approach that can fail if the other player quickly moves away from you. However it can allow you to verify another player even if they match the crowds behaviour perfectly.
A variation of the previous strategy was to feign your death beside another member in the crowd but only if you are near another player. If pulled off successfully then the other player would rush over and kill that member in the crowd. Then what you would do is get up from feigning your death and kill the other player. This strategy works because after each kill the player has a cool down period in which they have to wait before killing again. If you attack another player during this cool down period then you are guaranteed to successfully pull off the kill. This works best when there are only two players remaining as getting up from a feigned death clearly reveals your position.
During the weekend we were fortunate enough to be interviewed by several journalists. In particular James O'Connor listed us in his article for games.on.net.
James wrote: It’s a wonderfully stylish game, with an immediate fun hook and a clear set of objectives, which is to say that if there was any justice they’d be a computer with a copy installed in every pub around the country by the end of the year.
On the Sunday of AVCon the game was used in the Ultimate Gamer Tournament. It was the game in which participants would play to qualify for the third round. The game was had a brief appearance in the AVCon opening ceremony.
Again thanks to all who played the game and the AVCon/IGR crew for putting on such a great event. We are looking to release the game towards the end of the month. Stay tuned.
