Week 5 – Game Testing and Feedback

Latest game features:

The start menu and the interactable objects have been created and/or improved. Now the player is given a starting menu to make the game feel a little more formal and polished. The intractable objects can now be interacted with by pressing R as well as clicking on them directly.

This week’s focus was hugely on gathering feedback from peers and reflecting on how the game can be better improved by this feedback. A survey was made using Google Forums and posted on the unit discord during the tutorial time to gather feedback from other students.

Difficulties:

I didn’t have any difficulties this week as all the coding for this week’s features has been done elsewhere.

Feedback:

The questions asked in the survey investigated three main topics:

• The movement and controls of the player
• The progression of the game and the implementation of the upgrades
• And the level design.

The responsiveness of the player and the simplicity of the controls received mainly positive feedback but the difficulty in defeating the enemies was impossible. It was later found that the attack damage was set to zero when no upgrades had been done so it was impossible to defeat enemies until you survived long enough to find a chest and earn gold that way. Some suggestions for improvements were to add visual feedback when each side has been hit such as a slash animation.

The overall game progression was clear and the game loop was easy to follow. The main suggestions for improvement were to implement a visual representation of your upgrades and to improve the UI to better show your gold and stats.

The level design did not receive as much positive feedback as the map was not clear and the dash ability made the level even more confusing. The game was said to not properly suit the Metroidvania and platforming style and making the level map easier to access all areas sooner was highly suggested.

Features soon to be introduced:

• Implementing the final boss fight

References:

Google Forum - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1vPx8UER-Ufbd1Cn_HKVp3Nfu5z_Nu4F9nrT8cfA8Hfg/edit#responses