Another Successful Beta Test
Now that we finally pushed a big update last month, it’s a good time to put it on peoples’ radar again and do some beta testing. To that end, I posted a link to reddit (r/InteractiveCYOA). This was well received, with a decent number of upvotes and shares which drove it to the top of the “hot” list on the subreddit for a day or so.
As a result, around 300 new people tried it over the course of 48 hours. Some people even hopped into our discord to discuss. Shoutout especially to Broken_Genesis, Nobody the First, and BloodredAi, who offered their musings and helped us squash a few bugs.
Bugfixes and Improvements
- It now precompiles the whole story when we deploy it, making it much faster than before.
- Fixed a situation where discord logins without email addresses would cause the app to crash
- Fixed a bug where Scholar player characters couldn’t get passed the tea scene.
- Fixed an oversight where you could be damaged by a trap even when you succeeded on the roll to dodge it. This was a holdover from when HP was more crunchy.
- Added a simple loading message so you know the story isn’t broken when you first bring it up.
- We made future updates much faster and easier. Pushing to the appropriate branch on the github repository will auto deploy to the server.
On Finding an Audience
For all its success, I should mention that the reddit post was later taken down by moderators without much explanation. I surmise it’s because while Mage Hand is definitely an interactive Choose Your Own Adventure and people liked it, it’s not the specific format that typically populates that subreddit. Which points to a more general challenge for us: finding the corners of the internet where it can thrive, where people appreciate what it’s trying to do.
This is an experimental format, so despite having many similarities to other things, it sometimes looks out of place in communities dedicated to a particular adjacent niche. It’s an RPG with no graphics, battle systems, or number-crunching strategy. It’s a visual novel with more reading and less visuals. It’s a text adventure of sorts, but it’s not a guess-the-word text parser like Zork, and it’s not trying to be retro. It’s based on my tabletop campaign, but it has no resemblance to the rules of D&D or Pathfinder. And because it’s a server-based browser game and not something self-contained and downloadable, it can’t really be posted in game marketplaces like Steam and Itch.io.
None of this should necessarily be an obstacle to getting people to notice the project, but marketing is not my forte. A while back I put together a whitepaper of sorts for our own reference, and I think this in-progress version illustrates the gap between my system design skills and marketing skills.
Nevertheless, it tests very well. It’s hard to explain what it is in conversation, but people who try it mostly “get it”, and often, they like it. They like the art, the writing, the design, the characters. They ponder its challenges and then solve them. They want more. That is immensely gratifying.