Playtesting week and the Contest

We are uncovering some good bugs in ChipWits playtesting this week. So far none have been a mystery. I’ve been able to replicate and squash them in short order.

Also doing a little gameplay tweaking. I was nervous about the SAY chip because when I first implemented it the voice synthesizer would lock out all mouse and keyboard input while it had its SAY. So I set the cycle cost to 5 to ensure that the mission would end quickly. Now it’s much better behaved and Mark Roth suggested it be free to encourage its use. So be it. Along with that I made SING free. So ChipWits can talk and sing without sacrificing scoring.

Now that I know ChipWits behaves well on a number of people’s machines I am going to slowly spread the word. Not going to do a major PR campaign until we’ve run another week’s contest with a more challenging mission.

The next few days I’ll tweak baddie behavior and animation. Electrocrabs were idiots in the original game and I plan to raise their IQ’s a few points.

We will start selling the beta game tomorrow. I’ve got an account with the online distributer BMT Micro and just uploaded a batch of serial numbers. By the end of February I should know whether I have a future as an Indie Gamer.