More Playtest Notes

Sorry, no new build this week, though for the sake of whoever might be looking to play, here's a link to the most recent build of the game.

This week I was busier than usual, and decided not to work on the game until after the Indie City Games meetup, which occurs every two months or so. At the meetup, I showed off the game and got a few people to try playing. I immediately observed some things, and learned even more when they were done playing and I got to interview them:

1)  I need to tutorialize harder. People don't know that you can use WASD to move. I'll need for the game to detect whether you're using a controller or not, so I can have the game mention the analog stick if it is relevant.

2) This level is absolutely too difficult:

A lot of people understand that you're supposed to make multiple charges in quick succession though. A lot of people also understand that you don't have to make full charges. What people don't understand is that the player object takes time to rotate to face where you want it to face. I wonder what would happen if the player rotated instantaneously upon releasing a charge...

3) For the second meetup in a row, people kept mentioning how rewarding it feels when all the goals disappear together. They love the levels when you can solve everything in one go. One person told me they wanted the linked goal nodes to disappear as soon as they cleared all of them, instead of waiting for the timer to run down. I think the lesson here is that hitting a target cleanly is an inherently joyful activity. I mean, we've known this for years - it's why headshots exist - I've just never thought of it that way for this game.

4) This level is intriguing:

There is no one clean solution to this level. I just thought having switches and kill walls in this configuration would be interesting. It seems I was right, because more than one person called it out as being particularly fun or as making them feel clever. I'll have to try to recreate this type of level.

5) There seems to be a bug involving enemy shields and pressing and holding Mouse 0 (left click) while you are mid-charge. This is a bug I'll have to look into for next week.

And that's it! For next week I'll be acting on all this information, prioritizing the parts I've written in red text.

And, as always, in the build linked above the charging-up noise is by Javier Zumer. I use and modify it under this license.

Moving up the Movement

New build for this week is up here!

Making a post early this week since I'll be away over the weekend. This week I added, changed, or moved 4 levels. Here are two of them:

I made these changes primarily to extend the period of time that I'm teaching linked goals / bounce walls and also so that I can introduce movement much sooner into the game.

I'm not yet sure how I feel about the top level pictured above. It's a little loose - there's a lot of ways to solve the level, and you don't need to interact with anything to solve it. However, in every case, it feels like you have to be either quick, clever, or both to hit both linked goal nodes in time. I guess that's good enough. Plus, if Zelda is anything to go by, it doesn't matter if the player is solving things the "right" way as long as the player feels like they are solving things "their" way.

Charging-up noise is by Javier Zumer. I use and modify it under this license.

Revised Opening Statements

You can play the new build here!

This week I've added two levels: one that looks almost exactly like the level that comes before it, and one that's all-new. Both of these took several revisions, and will probably be revised one or two more times at some point.

I'm in the process of figuring out what should be taught to the player at what times. Up til now, Wrap walls, multi-hit-goals, and linked goals got front billing, followed closely by bounce walls. But switches, kill walls, and hitting moving objects are arguably more important than some of those. For now, I've made kill walls and switches introduced much, much earlier.

I want to put moving objects sometime after linked goals... maybe before bounce walls, maybe after. That restructuring will happen sometime next week.

Charging-up noise is by Javier Zumer. I use and modify it under this license.

No post this week!

Sorry, no post this week! I attended GDC instead of working on my blog. In my defense, GDC is pretty awesome.

Light Tutorialization

New build is up here!

Just a small update this week. I mostly just built a level that forces players to navigate a maze. It appears within the first few levels of the game so that more people will realize that they can move about without charging everywhere they go. It was the number one issue with the game in the last playtest, so it's important that this level properly communicate to the player.

That being said, I ended up pulling back a bit on how directly I spoke with the player here. I created an object that reveals text as you charge. Once charging reveals the first bit of text, you really want to see the entire message. But when you reveal the last bit, you see that the message actually is trying to teach you NOT to charge. It's a little playful this way, and even though it seems counterintuitive, I think the way it asks the player to charge to reveal its text actually makes its message more effective. Here's what it looks like:

The problem is that I don't want to test this system without first testing the level without this tutorial text. If the level on its own teaches people what I want them to learn, then I don't want to introduce tutorial text into the mix. There's an outside chance I can make this game without any tutorial at all (outside of the instructions menu).

Next week I'm going to continue to revise the beginning of the game. Specifically, I want to see if I can introduce switches and kill walls way earlier.

As always, the charging-up noise is by Javier Zumer. I use and modify it under this license.

EDIT: Whoops! I actually left that tutorial feature in, and I wasn't unsubscribing from events correctly, which causes a huge bug! Fixed that now. And I figured I'd leave the tutorial feature in.

No post this week!

Sorry all, I had company over this weekend. I had planned to have an update ready before Friday, but I wasn't able to get to it. More updates to come.

Level Adjustments

(New Build is up here!)

I'm still acting on a bunch of feedback I got from the indie city games. I reworked half of one level and all of another level.

This is the same "hexagonal bouncy shape" level as before, only now instead of two linked goal nodes on the right-hand side, there's an enemy. This way you use the hexagon to solve both halves of the level. I missed the two linked goal nodes though, so I redid the next level to look like this:

At first, it didn't have the enemy on the right-hand side, but the level felt too simple, and I wanted the player to sort of be led to how to use the bounce and warp plates in the level. With the enemy, you're guided to traverse the level in a certain way. It's even possible to clear all the linked goal nodes and the enemy in one attack, which is neat.

As always, charge-up noise is by Javier Zumer. I'm using and modifying that noise under this license.