Where There's An Alpha, There's A Way!

This was the last week (for 08/08 - 08/14) before play testing (which will be this Sunday, August 21st), and all involved are revving up their coding, modeling, and narrative fingers to bring a nice, playable Alpha for those who decided to sign up; and we can't wait to share what we've done so far!

There was a wonderful mid-week meeting this past Wednesday, where Devin, Chris, and Shylo got together at 3rd Street and Stuff coffee cafe to discuss the finer points of the story (the whats and whys of Mortimer's mind), narrative cues (like lightning flashes, shrill screams, books moving on their own - just to name a few), and overall tension and ambience that we could provide the players. One idea, in particular, is to possibly have each player start off sitting in a recliner in the middle of the library, and are berated by Mortimer for a good 20 seconds or so as soon as the game start, revealing to the player what puzzle they should be doing (in a subtle way), and condescending them for their possible lack of talent in the art of using their brains; in which, we hope the player will show Mortimer otherwise!

We are also still working on better looking versions of the models we are using now, creating new models and placeholders for objects we have yet to truly delve into, developing proper "puzzle sequencing" (so that player 1 can't solve player 5's puzzles, on a whim, as an example), contemplating on what kind of timing we should be using for each player's turn (which we'll finally decide on when we actually get some play testing involved), and we even briefly discussed the intricacies of how we will present this game at the LexPlay convention floor, coming at the end of this October (just in time for a nice Halloween scare)!

However, back on the topic of play testers. We do have several people signed up and ready to play coming this weekend, but you can seldom have too much of a good thing, so we are definitely still taking on even more testers, for those interested! If you feel you are one of them, please follow the link below (which is HVRE's main website for this year's project), and follow the giant arrow to a simple form to be filled out. We will contact you before the first play testing date to figure out any details.

http://hvredev.wixsite.com/home

We hope to see our play testers this weekend, and don't worry, we haven't added in the scares just yet, so no need to bring your own diapers or worry about having a mini-stroke (not yet, anyway)!