First Sightings and the Name Game

First Sightings

Went to BAFTA a week or so ago and took Inco with me. I had a vague intention of showing it to a couple of people I knew - more from a sense of 'this is what I've been doing with my time' than from a PR message point of view. Having not shown it to anyone other than family and friends before I was a little nervous.

Incoboto is a bit of a weird game. Trying to describe it is quite hard: 'Mario meets Portal meets Ico meets... um... Flaboo? No, you really have to feel it all together with the art and the music and Helios' weird dialogue and... oh, I give up.'

Thankfully, the people who saw were:

a) Lovely folk I liked working with in the past
b) Kind to someone clearly utterly uncomfortable demoing their work

The good news is they seemed to like it. Seeing people struggling with one or two of the controls gave me some really valuable feedback and now the controls have been tweaked to 'playable at social gathering after alcohol' level.

After Kara (my wife) gave me a good kicking the other week for wallowing in self-doubt and self-indulgent examples of artistic temperament Inco is now on track for getting finished in a reasonable time-span. The current release date is set for around the end of August. As Helios would say: "Woohoo! Where's the coffee?!" Inco wouldn't even gesture. He has no arms.

The Name Game
The one really niggling thing remaining (apart from weeks of content creation and bug-fixing) is the name.

The reality is that this is an iPad game. The iPad store is only really set up to work on searches and thus names people can remember. As a result, Incoboto is probably going to change to something more clearly memorable in the next few weeks. I have a few ideas. None quite fit, but that's the problem with working titles; you grow to love them quite quickly, and they soon become mentally entangled with the game overall.

I can expect a few shocked reactions when the renaming occurs - but that's wonderful. It means people care.

The reason for dealing with this name malarky now is that I'm going to have to produce a promo video relatively soon, showing the promise of this game and why people should be interested. It'll need a firm title by then. The good news is that I'll have to write some more 'music' for it, which is always enjoyable. I had written an entire album for it, but on reflection it got a bit... um... dark and strange.

For those who haven't listened to it before, it's available for free download here.

Enjoy.