Conflict of Opinion

I delayed a day to avoid throwing too many words on the screen....

Yesterday, while we were working diligently away, Marguerite came in & announced that the marketing side of the publishing house we signed with thought that the tutorial we had created was complete & utter rubbish...We needed to redo it right away.

There are many things wrong with this & I will attempt to keep my professionalism.

So first off, it is completely in their right to tell us as such. They may have their own criticisms of our product. However,

To do so without any additional direction or concrete reason why our tutorial fails so decisively does not help push the conversation forward nor endear the two parties. Simply exclaiming that it is terrible, helps no one it only causes more problems.

To the defense of our tutorial we have hard data of the number of people who have played the game via testing & at conventions. Not to mention the victory we won at the Strasbourg Film festival. At that venue the game was held up entirely by its own design. We were not present to walk players through. And the final result was that we won Best Work in Progress.

The timing of this feedback also comes at one of the most in-opportune times. Pathogen is going gold master/ code lock next Friday the 19th. A week and half notice on such a "obviously failing" system is simply not professional, especially since the marketing crew had a build, with the tutorial included on Sept 10th, exactly 1 month ago.

So what do we do?

Well, you bite the bullet. Act professionally & change it.

In reaction, some things are simply getting cut.

- Pinch/Pull Zoom is out, too many problems have already arisen. No need to continue to fight it.
- Push Notifications are also out. Not enough time to learn about how this works, was causing some minor headaches trying to get it implemented a few days ago.

My time is now exclusively dedicated to this new tutorial.
 - We spec'ed two different paths, picked one & I started to dig into it.
 - Ultimately it is a far more restrictive, guide-me-by-the-hand kind of tutorial that eliminates most difficulty/challenge.

Some final notes. I accept that the tutorial was not perfect, it was functional & in my opinion served its purpose with a modest success rate. I would have no issue with addressing the short comings of the tutorial as first week update. Especially since that would have provided us with real time, market driven data about how effective the tutorial truly is.

But its not my call, so I'd better get back to work.