After conducting a total of 8 playtests, I collated my survey results to take a look at what needs improving from my initial build of the game. In this post, i’ll talk about the results and what I need to do moving forward.
First up was two questions on the movement of my character, and how it felt. Most scored this area fairly highly, the majority of responses coming at above 7/10 at the very least. A recurring theme in the complaints section was that the movement felt sluggish, so I will certainly be marking that down as an improvement that can be made. While I certainly believe that the jumping ‘feels’ very static and sticky, I think rectifying those would require proper animations that are outside my scope for the time being, so that’ll be lower on my priority list.
The aiming and shooting mechanics were a real failing point of the current build. I anticipated this – but felt the best way to improve it was with some hard feedback straight away.
All of the feedback points boil down to similar things: Restricting fire to a horizontal plane, clunky idle poses causing unpredictable aim, and the lack of an available cross hair all served to make the aiming and shooting unresponsive and clunky. These things are top priority to rectify before my final build.
From this section, it looks like I need to improve the readability of the actions my turrets are taking, alongside creating a much more evident link between a turret and the power box its linked with. The later area of my level needs some work too, as the design of the puzzle seems to have come across far differently to what I had anticipated when creating it. That’s definitely something to learn from when I go back and tweak it.
Interestingly enough, we have a 50/50 split between people who think the turret lock-on time is forgiving enough or not. In this instance, I think I will take into account the fact that some of those who answered ‘yes’ may have been indifferent, while it’s likely all of the ‘no’ answers definitely believed something was wrong. I’ll look into a small tweak in this area to see if there’s an improvement. Overall, my turrets rated lower on the scale than my character, so definitely need some tweaking to bring them up to par.
The placement of my repairable robots and the overall level design as a whole seemed to rate fairly highly in player opinion. I think with adjustments to my character, the turrets and the final puzzle area of the game this feel will improve enough that no further modification to the rest of the level is really needed. Were this a full build of the game, that’s likely what I would look at again once I’d rectified the aforementioned areas.
The majority of players found the game challenging, and none felt unable to progress. These are both good points, and reinforce my thoughts that the level design in and of itself is low-priority for now, reserved for second playtests if I were to get that far.
I got a lot of useful miscellaneous feedback in the comments section, giving me ideas on how to rectify a few of the puzzle/level problems and create some lasting distinctions between enemies and friends. A lot of whats on here are planned features already (sounds, explosion particles, replacing of block-out props) but within there is very valuable feedback.
I asked a broad variety of people about my game, from friends to family members and even some strangers through online forums. Hopefully this gave me a wide enough variety of responses to get some unbiased feedback. By the looks of it, the feedback I received was all reliable and valuable. Were I to hold another playtest, I would definitely like to get a larger sample size – but with limited time to wait for feedback and many friends away for holidays, I’ll have to make do for this one.
Using the feedback I gained, I created a trello for my development page. In it I listed all my completed mechanics, the mechanics I had yet to create, the assets I needed for the final game, and the feedback points I felt most prudent to work on. This will help keep me focused on my final goal, and show me how much work I have left to reach a finished state.