I got an email at work earlier today congratulating me on having won the Jay is Games CGPC#7. The site is blocked by policy where I work, but I logged on with my cell phone’s little browser, read the news, and fired a message off to Ben. Up to that point, all we could see were the “hearts” ratings on the competition page (where people rate the games from one to five hearts). According to that metric, few people had played our game, and many other games had higher ratings. I’d written off even placing in the top five at that point, and was thinking that Ben and I would have to sit down after the comp to review comments and figure out where we had misjudged what would work in a casual games competition. So, it was a very pleasant surprise.
Thanks go out to everyone who worked on the game. The process for developing this game was described in issue 57 of SPAG, but briefly, we had two phases of review. First, we asked a somewhat broad group of reviewers to take a look at the plot and structure of the game, and to critique the game from the perspective of design and writing. A couple weeks later, we started rapid beta-testing cycles. Our first wave of concept reviewers included David Anderson, Conrad, Matt Wigdahl, John Lodder, Duncan Bowsman, Jenni Polodna, Sam Kabo Ashwell and Yoon Ha Lee. Our beta-testers included Adrian Colley, Beth Vanichtheeranont, Jacob Lee, John Lodder, Peter Olson, and Rob Dubbin. Sarah Morayati gets special thanks for being both an early reviewer and a tenacious beta-tester. Rochelle Lodder also deserves credit for copy editing the entire work in record time. Without all of this assistance, Hoosegow would not have been half as well-written, and would have had (at least) twice the bugs. Thanks, everyone.