A not so quick introduction and ppresentation

Disclaimer :

As precised in the name of this blog I am in no way a pro, I'm not part of the video games industry.
If anything getting in the field of collecting players reactions to an early build of a game, to see what needs to be changed would greatly interest me in the long run. This blog is meant for me to lay down my thoughts about the sessions of playtesting I do on a particular game benevolently . Why ? For what purpose ? Well in order to  maybe garner some useful feedback from pros who could help me improve the feedback I'm providing to the devs.

For any owner of the game passing by : I'm in no way their official playtester I do that benevolently and therefore this blog should NOT be driving the conversation. If you have feedback to give to the devs please do so in the steam forums.


Okay now that we got that out of the way let's do some proper introductions


Let me introduce myself and give you some background story as to why I started this whole adventure :

Hi there my name is Aurélien CRETEUR aka Jeremy Quest aka TheSyldat (my steam nickname) I'm a 32 year old French gamer passionated by technology and games. I decided to basically use my savings to dedicate myself in gaining and developing experience in playtesting / QA on my own terms to make myself potentially "appealing" to members of the industry in that filed with my own means and possibilities.

Thanks to a game reviewing podcast named "Linux Game Cast" I discovered kind of the "perfect game" for me to take a first crack.

Despite being mainly a PC gamer these days, I have always been the "gaming on a controller" type guy. If a game has a consistent control scheme on a controller I'd rather play it from my couch on a controller than in front of the computer sitting at the desk.

I don't really have a genre that I prefer over others . But there is a still a very particular type of game that I like. Flow inducing games, that do it through very simple geometry, dead simple mechanical premises and where colors music and mechanics are all complementing each others to induce it.

I even ended up classifying them in my game library as "FIGOSK Games", the acronym standing for "Flow Inducing Geometry Of the Synesthesical Kind"

Yeah right, that very personal way of classifying those games is not really that much giving away what type of titles I am talking about. Let me flesh out a bit about those games.

First of all let's establish what synesthesia is for the few of my readers unfamiliar with that term and its definition. Synesthesia is basically according to the definition a neurological phenomenon through which an individual through stimuli of one type of sensory or cognitive functions of their brain gets a reaction that comes from another sensory or cognitive function of their brain.

For example color to digits synesthetes are completely involuntarily associating numbers with colors it happens without them bein' able to do anything against it and consistently.

So basically synesthesia is a phenomenon through which your brain generate "weird combos of responses to stimuli"

In art synesthesia has been "emulated" in various ways to basically give people who are not affected by that phenomenon a "feel" of what it could be like for those affected.

Video games being an art form some games have willingly (or not) tried to replicate that phenomenon in various ways often leading to the creation of games that are very prone to be flow inducing.

I have never taken the "test" to see if I am a synesthete or not but throughout my years of playing games, I have noticed that when a game has combo of simple geometrical shape that always have a dedicated color, with a very fitting music , or better yet the rest of the background of the game is reacting to the music being played dynamically, I end up being really good at the game and reach insane high levels of play because the combo is basically getting me into the flow super quick and effortlessly.

Namely the following titles ended up on my list of flow inducing games through simple geometry colors and music correctly combined.

Tempest 2000 (and its spiritual recreation Typhoon 2001)
Txk (because of course Jeff Minter knew how to improve his own original work 20 years after the original)
Space Giraffe
Gridrunner Revolution
Geometry Wars 3
Internal Section (on PS1)
Rez
Child of Eden
The Lumines series
Vib Ribbon
Audio Surf
Revolver Reactor (with this one not really aiming for it, and me being receptive being almost certainly a "happy accident" so to speak)

In other words some games that made some choices of simplicity of gameplay mechanics with simple geometry shapes and fitting music or simply just reacting to the music "correctly" had me going back to them because they generate a very specific "flow" state of mind not the type I gain through playing quake 3 for hours on end no, but another type that is soothing hypnotic and relaxing.

So with that being said and out of the way you can pretty much guess what was my reaction, when the "3 Witches" of linux gaming "reviewingdom" that are Venn Stone, Jordan Cwang, and Pedro Mateus talked about a game that was the first ever game to enter that family to be fully 3D but not only not on rails but to top it all with "6 degrees of freedom" on offer on steam but with the caveat that it was in early access.

Yeeep I jumped to my steam account and bought me some Polynomial 2 goodness knowing full well that maybe my first contact with that puppy would be a bit rough at first.

And boy was the first dive feeling the same as drinking your first ever bottle of "Schwepppes indian tonic" the taste is very peculiar and your face is not really looking like you are having a happy fun time with it.

If on keyboard and mouse the game controls fairly well and in a satisfying manner (once we remap some of those bindings properly) , on a an xbox controller the original controlling scheme was ... not that great. Nothing horrible in my opinion but still confusing in terms of choice of mappings and to make matters worse scaling the speed at which the camera was moving with the right stick was not quite there yet. And with one of the enemies being too damn quick for a controller gamer the experience ended up getting frustrating fairly quickly.

Given that I was streaming my first ever dive into the game and tweeted about it, and wrote in the steam forums of the game that I am a "controller focused gamer" and would be streaming my tests of the game Alexey one of the brothers developing the game came to see me playing. It took me a while to understand that my only viewer at that moment was one of the devs. Once I understood that we engaged conversation about the game and its game feel.

Needless to say that I took immense gloves in saying that I found binding options for the xbox controller to be on the lacking side of the fence.

For several reasons first , simply put I didn't wanted to be a dick about it and to sound like a dick about it. Second of all despite my frustrations and the control scheme being fairly counter intuitive to me, we were not on Brigador's levels of ape shit non sense. Sure controls were not stellar but hey at least I had some wiggle room and rebinding possibilities at my disposal, sadly not the kind I had hoped for, but still I was provided with a menu allowing me to hope that in the near future possibilities could be expanded. So I talked it out with Alexey and made a post about in the steam forums. But more on the controls in my second post.

After persisting with it and getting consistent in my testings in terms of how much I communicate and how regularly I stream my testings, Alexey kept coming back to my stream and we started to talk a lot. And I caught wind that they were not doing so well in terms of morale, and financially they are afraid of not bein' able to finish the game or deliver on time.

So as a gamer who is having in his hands the early builds of a game he always dreamed about and who is in desperate need of other opinions before making anymore suggestions I learned that they needed a moral boost. That was the "Well fuck me sideways" moment, not that great of a feeling if you ask me...

I had things I wanted to request but I was not sure if I was not gonna turn the game into something that would be so niche that only I could appreciate it, and on top of that it's not really the moment to "hit" them , especially a team of two , with a gigantic wall of modifications to ask for. Saddly this game was apparently played by people that were not that much "socializing" about it. Despite several posts on various subjects in the steam forums of the game, and tweeting about me streaming it, posting on facebook that I was streaming it, only Alexey was my audience for that game.

At this point I was hitting a wall , even asking myself if the title was too much "out there" to be appreciated. Or is it just the type of experience you don't talk about, some kind of secret gem , a "hush hush" title that you only share the knowledge of its existence with people you know for sure are gonna appreciate it ?

I mean jeez in shmups focused forums, fans of Jeff Minter's work are often told to "tone it the fuck down with your weird tripy shmups wannabees" but more often than not its just harmless childish friendly banter coming from others. The type of inside joke just meant to remind us that we are enjoying games that are very much their "own thing" but at least we get a venue and responses from fellow gamers enjoying the same title. Here this was a dead quiet silent desert.

Hell even on reddit the few fellows who posted about it didn't say much and passing by people were just saying that this was the only game that they see on steam that would make them buy a VR headset. And that was pretty much about it....

Understandable given that the only subreddit were the game is mentioned is the subreddit dedicated to VR games.

So I was here stuck alone with tumbleweeds.

I then started to share the game by offering it to a selected few people I trust and are open minded enough to bear with the rough start for a while. But Ch0wW who was my safest bet, is more and more getting involved in the quake community and having therefore little spare time for Polynomial 2. But when he is around I receive some feedback from him and we shared ideas on the game. But we were equally torn on some questions. So back at full start I need to get involved and organize some events , some play sessions to get other gamers to give it a ride and give me their thoughts on the game.

So that's how it all started. Boy that was a long walk !

If you bared with me so far, I promise the following articles are gonna be the retelling of those paly sessions and what I gathered from them. So promise from now on, only info on gamers feedback about the game and a more fleshed out presentation of the game itself.