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Assignment 3 post mortem

The insights gained from playtesting: The most apparent result from playtests was that players were slow and sometimes unable to understand the mechanics of the game. This was most evident in our first playtest where the game featured instructions on how to start the game. Our first tester, knowing literally nothing about the game, was sceptical that it was a joke because he couldn’t interpret the instructions we had laid out.

The subsequent playtests helped us gradually realise another quirk of learnability design in games. At the start of the first level, the player was shown a disappearing/toast message that explained the basic controls and goal. Most players only noticed subsequent popups like this in later levels when they were actively lost and seeking instruction. This told us to me more intentional about directing player attention around the screen.

Our core playtester, who was slightly more familiar with the genre paradigms, recommended not a higher difficulty level but more variety in the challenge in the form of different enemy types. This fell in line with most of the answers to our survey question, “I felt the game challenged me in a variety of ways.” They were mostly ambivalent to this question.

How the game ended up: The final prototype ended up with, at the very least, better learnability than it started with. The balancing changes have been mostly ironed out with gold now scaling not only to your performance in each level but as you progress to higher levels. This removes the incentive for players to redo level one to collect gold as there is more to be gained further through the levels. Some of the more obtrusive sounds were removed to declutter the audio and only play background music and sounds that inform and reinforce to the player their actions. The gameplay and enemies are mostly untouched from their initial conception.

How it could be improved further: Expansion to said gameplay experience would likely be the next logical step in development. Previously mentioned suggestions from playtests like adding enemies that target the player or collision between the ship and planet to force players to work around it are ideas to upend the dominant strategy of keeping the ship in the middle of the planet to shoot at all angles. This gameplay change could still fall under the umbrella of balancing so a real gameplay change might be adding new upgrades to the shop. It would be very easy to lean into the roguelite genre and randomise these upgrades with planned synergies between different items. This is also quite an intuitive idea to a core demographic who play this exact type of progression system often.

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Iterating assignment 3 project

The iterations and changes between playtests were mostly regarding bug fixes and balancing. The more consequential changes were seeking to help improve the learnability of the game. For example, between the first and second playtests a toast message was shown briefly at the beginning of each level telling the player what score they needed to progress.

Sounds also give more feedback to players about the weight of their actions and were added for that reason. Some of the more obtrusive sounds however (I’m not a sound designer), were left out. Crucial sounds like shooting still provide enough value to the player to leave in the game.

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more textbook yap

In this textbook yap post, once again referencing Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop as well as a video by Game maker’s toolkit: How Video Game Economies are Designed.

Chapter 3: Working with formal elements, mentions resources as one such element but I’d like to elaborate on how the economy of resources have an effect on the UX. As mentioned by Mark Brown of Game maker’s toolkit, some of an economy’s major aspects are a source and a converter among others.

The source of specific resources in games are a driving factor in how a player will behave, hence affecting the UX. In fast-paced shooters like doom, the rules that dictate the ‘glory kill’ system heavily incentivise players to push forwards when they’re falling behind because valuable resources (health, ammo, etc) come from kill and enemy at close range. Contrast this with more methodical, cover-based shooters where health regenerates automatically. This opposite way of implementing a source incentivises players to hide from combat when in danger because they don’t have to chase down enemies for health. Contrast further with survival horror games, that have a very stingy tap, giving limited resources and forcing players to be thoughtful and cautious while playing as, in equal but opposite effect to doom, they don’t magically regenerate resources.

A converter, often synonymous with basic shops and crafting systems, affects the UX by its complexity and how front-and-center it is to the gameplay loop. In similar effect to stingy sources in survival horror games, a converter (or in this specific case a crafting system) with limited input and a wider range of potential output makes players thoughtful of how to spend their resources. In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, there are more different items to collect than can be useful to the player. This gives players a chance to experiment with the games converter/cooking system without feeling restricted by it, contributing further the exploratory nature of the game. However, in the examples of Metro: Exodus and The Last of Us Part II, there are only a handful of unique resources which can be used to produce a multitude of different outputs. Combine this with another stingy tap, and players now have to think again about how best to spend their resources.

To throw a spanner in the works, Satisfactory’s entire gameplay loop revolved around its economy rather than playing second fiddle like the previous examples. It also leans even further into the abondance approach than Breath of the Wild does and utilises positive feedback loops. This flips the players’ mindset from ‘how do I make the most of what little I have?’ to ‘how to I squeeze as much as possible out of this near limitless supply?’

I would talk on that even more, but I’ve once again blown past my word ‘limit’ by a country mile. They said more words didn’t equal more marks, but they didn’t say it meant less marks.

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games. AK Peters/CRC Press

Brown, M. (2022, April 26). How Video Game Economies are Designed. Youtube.com. https://youtu.be/Zrf1cou_yVo

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Playtest 5 (assignment 3)

Pre-playtest questionnaire: Our final playtester identified themselves as a wide demographic tester because they ranked our game’s genre 2/5 and its cousin genres slightly higher. One of the cousin genres did make it into their list of 3 favourites.

The test: They decided to spend time experiementing with the game and found there was no boundary in the menu screen and proceeded to miss the toast message at the top of the screen upon starting the first level. Like previous testers they realised the goal of the game after failing the level so at least the death message is clear. They found that the difficulty curve was very steep from level to level and disliked that they lost their purchased upgrades after dying. They were the only one to correctly assume the gold earned was correlated with remaining health but only as a result of being probed for thoughtful comments. Even with their struggle to progress through subsequent levels, they opted not to replay earlier levels for gold because they simply didn’t want to and felt they shouldn’t have to.

Post-playtest survey: Once again aligning with previous survey data the game was ranked a 2/5 for learnability. The game was listed a 4/5 for difficulty and only 3/5 for enjoyment but part of the reason for these scores can be attributed to the fact that they were part of the wide demographic.

Conclusions: Adjustments to be made based on the results of this test are limited. Learnability is still a key area for improvement as well as balancing. However, some suggestions received in the interest of improving the game have significant potential to hurt it instead. They disliked the rule that the player loses all upgrades upon death and wanted to keep them. This may make subsequent runs easier but could be exploited to overpower the player and trivialise later levels. Smaller, permanent upgrades may be a possibility later in development as a form of meta-progression but for now it doesn’t effectively solve the issue of difficulty.

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Playtest 4 (assignment 3)

Pre-playtest questionnaire: Although this tester might feasably be classified as core demographic, following our previous decisions, this tester is a wide demographic as although they ranked all sugested genres very highly, they did not list any of them in their top favourites.

The test: They initially mentioned that the start menu was confusing to them before reading the instructions and after failing the first level they properly understood. On their next run they found that, as the player ship has more lives than the planet, they could sacrifice some ship lives to save the planet’s. They also didn’t fully realise what the win condition was, missing the toast message at the start, when they succeeded but correctly presumed they had reached a certain score. They were having trouble determining how the planet shield functioned, not seeing it appear (as it was not wrapped around the planet due to a visual bug) and wondered if it needed activating. Not knowing how gold was calculated, they also neglected to purchase any health upgrades as the planet seemed like it was in more danger.

Post-playtest survey: Survey answers articulated that they enjoyed the core gameplay and difficulty (when using a mouse) and were ambivalent towards its learnability.

Conclusions: The feedback that the menu was confusing before reading the instructions further solidifies the problem of UI design in the game’s learnability. The takeaway from this is to try and follow more strictly a concept introduced in Chapter 8 of Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop, ‘form follows function.’ This means that each UI element and placement needs to explicitly and primarily serve its intended purpose rather than borrowing UI conventions out of context.

The strategy of using the ship’s life as a sacrifice to preserve the planet has potential to add more decision making to the gameplay. If players were aware of how gold was calculated using lives, ‘spending’ them to block asteroids would feel like a more impactful decision and a last resort. A simple addition to the player’s knowledge of the game like this can deepen rather than expand the gameplay.

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Playtest 3 (assignment 3)

Pre-playtest questionnaire: Ranking 4s and 5s aross all of the questions and listing the games genre among their favourites, this playtester has been our first definite member of the core target demographic.

The test: Being more comfortable with the genre, they understood the game’s introduction more intuitively. They decided to replay level 1 without first playing level 2 with the following rationale: “The game didn't tell me i couldn't go back to level one.” They then encountered a bug that unlocked level 3 by completing level 1 twice. “If i can take a shortcut i might as well.” They were initially intrigued by the explosive shot upgrade but dissapointed with the result once they bought it.

Post-playtest survey: Their answers indicate that they were able to intuite the game decently well and found the challenge to be well suited to their skill level. It was clear to them how they should progress the game and upgrade their character at all times.

Conclusions: The general consensus emerging from these playtests is that the introduction given the players leaves a bit to be desired but the gameplay loop is intuitive and engaging enough that players can understand it after the initial knowledge leap. This player also very strongly represents our core demographic the fact that they enjoyed the experience and felt it was balanced is encouraging. Their willingness to exploit bugs is also to be expected of the average player. These bugs are of course being patched as they are found.

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Playtest 2 (assignment 3)

Pre-playtest questionnaire: This playtester strongly qualified themselves as a wide demographic player, not ranking any of the provided genres highly.

The test: The compounded effect that poor instruction has on a less experience player was quite apparent in this test. They had difficulty getting to grips with the controls and also with understanding the goal and loss condition of the game. The latter issue was not present in our first playtest. They found the upgrade screen more intuitive though but also thought the upgrades weren’t explained well enough.

Post-playtest survey: They mentioned through the survey that the game was hard to learn, difficult to play but still fun with the rankings 2, 4 and 4 on learnability, fun and difficulty respectively. They ranked the games visuals quite poorly, further indicating the need for a replacement to our placholder assets.

Conclusions: The main holes in out learnability experience from this test seem to be the start, only confirming what we knew from the first test, and the upgrade screen. We will add item descriptions in the shop that display while being hovered over and add a toast message at the beginning of each level to specify the explicit goal.

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Playtest 1 (assignment 3)

Pre-playtest questionnaire: We couldn’t quite classify our first playtester a core demographic because although they ranked the game’s genre and two cousin genres a 4/5 for enjoyment, none of them were listed in their favourite genre list. That being said, they did play games regularly and were experienced in a general sense all the same

The test:

Our issues surrounding learnability were immediately apparent as they were sceptical that our game was deliberate rage bait because of obscure instructions.

"It’s a bit weird your pressing enter when you've got a mouse button to click buttons…” "at first, I thought it was a trick game. Like a troll game. I've tried tricks like typing out enter and it didn’t work. Dragging over, also nothing."

They could reasonably intuit the goal of the game, or at the very least the loss condition. They were confused by the lack of visual around whether the planet shield was active or not and they quickly found a dominant (and somewhat boring) strategy of sitting in the middle of the screen to shoot the asteroids.

Post-playtest survey:

They specified that while the learnability of the game was lacking, they understood the gameplay design intuitively after the initial hurdle and rated their enjoyment a 4/5 in total with it neither feeling too hard nor too easy.

Conclusions:

This told us that we had a simple enough and engaging enough core gameplay loop and just needed to onboard players more effectively.

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Assignment 3 development progress

Tomorrow’s workshop will see our third of five playtests. We have all playtesting materials in order, sounds for the most important interactions.

The following is how the game is explained in the playtesting script: "When you spawn into the game to begin, you have one blaster and must defend both your ship and planet from the incoming asteroids. Every level you can spend any upgrade points you earned based on both your planet and ship’s health. You can upgrade your health, fire rate and apply a single-use planet shield. The game ends if you or the planet run out of health."

The levels scale in difficulty by increasing the number and speed of asteroids that hurtle towards the planet.

Most of our playtesting insights have been revolving around onboarding players without a fully fledged tutorial and tweaking the game balance like a seesaw with only one person on it. We have art assets in the making to add when they are ready so we have mostly been testing the gameplay loop rather than the visuals since they are placeholder.

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Assignment 3 initial group formation and planning

The group I’ve formed is between myself, Liam, Jordan and Tamika. The former two will assume the role of programmers, the latter as artist and I will organise and conduct playtests.

The game we will continue developing is Jordon’s asteroids game. We’ve begun delegating tasks; a google doc of things needing programming, art assets for Tamika to make including an improved one page & sell sheet, sound effects that I will produce and playtesting materials like pre-test questionnaires, surveys and a script to read. It may sound like I’m overselling my contributions simply because I understand more and am elaborating on what I have to do.

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Assignment 2 final product

I have kept all the ideas presented I the intermediate stage of assessment 2’s construction. You will play as a soldier in the immune/roman defence against corona virus with the two goals of repelling the attack and being awarded the corona muralis for valour in combat. I’ve called the larger enemies ‘worthy opponents’ as they are a similar stature to the player character which is comparatively larger than both fellow and enemy soldiers. I added the concept of ranged enemies that were worth very little in the progress to achieve the corona muralis. This means the player is best incentivised to leave the archers alone and chase higher value targets, causing more chaos and tension. This was originally going to be a rain of arrows coming from nowhere but I decided giving players the option to get rid of it if they really wanted to give more of a feeling of agency. Now if players do choose to make the siege defence objective easier, they are sacrificing their chances of fulfilling the second objective.

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Racing post mortem

Being that the elevator pitch for the game was the polar opposite to what was playtested, the results at least indicate that the areas I predicted would need focus when the game was updated, would in fact need that attention. I noted before the playtest that care would need to be taken to explain to the player how to interact with the world in a visual manner. This was exemplified by not only the tester noticing the lack of a score counter or specified objective/win condition, but by the inconsistency between the size of the car obstacles and their disproportionately larger collision boxes.

The player experience as a result was confusion and frustration at what to do and how to do it. The conflict, on-coming traffic, was easily avoidable but only to the one who made the game; it was unreasonably difficult and inconsistent to anyone else.

Continuing development on this game as specified would see the ability to accelerate and decelerate, and a clear score counter and displayed goal to strive for.

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Racing playtest

Known issues before the playtests:

The game did not have an indicator for score to tell the player how much they had or needed, nor did it actually punish them for driving off the road other than the warning signal

Noted during the test:

Had trouble figuring out the hitbox of the cars Mentioned only being able to drive sideways He didn’t try to drive off the road (which was unexpected)

His answers to the below questions were:

What did you like about it?: liked the controls (i.e. nothing just being polite)

What didn’t you like about it?: “Tell me what the win condition is” “cliché – overdone” “I would not spend 50c on this game”

What would you change?: the win condition the boundaries move forwards and backwards more speed as the game progresses

How would you describe it?: “…if donkey kong tried playing mariokart”(???)

The takeaway from this is, to put it lightly, that there is a lot to work on in every aspect of the game but specifically in conveying messages to the player and more conflict to overcome.

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Assignment 2 progress

I’ve decided that the idea with the most potential for expansion is the idea developed from the asteroids game. My platformer idea could potentially hold mechanical depth but the concept is not endearing enough like webbed. The ‘reverse crossy road’ as I’ll refer to it has a similar core gameplay concept of pressure through juggling multiple objectives but the asteroids game has more potential for depth in that you can add more conflict to challenge the player’s skill in different ways than the racing game.

The idea I’ve come up with for the game’s premise, because I’m mentally 4, is to mesh the immune system with the roman army and have the goal be to attain the corona muralis, which was an actual military decoration for the first soldier over the wall in a siege campaign though it now has another meaning. The two conditions to be met, will be to defend your host again a hoard of pathogens and to be the ‘mvp’. These two requirements should disincentivise players from sabotaging their fellow soldiers as it progresses the mvp objective but jeopardises the hoard defence one. I am also considering having larger, harder and more valuable enemies spawn scarcely to funnel the action into a focal point of the battle field a couple of times each mission.

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Racing general progress

I have followed the workshop tutorial and you can now drive down a road at a fixed speed, and avoiding on-coming traffic. I also added a warning that appears whenever you drive off the road which admittedly flies in the face of my original mission statement and will be removed or changed to encourage the player. Now that I have a game where you need to dodge cars and stay on the road I just have to flip it on its head. This will come not only in the form of mechanical changes but visual indicators to show the player how they are meant to interact with the game.

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Racing elevator pitch

The idea I've come up with for this racing game is:

“In Reckless Rampage your goal is self-explanatory; you must swerve to hit as many obstacles as possible while staying above a certain speed limit. As you pass thresholds for time above the speed limit and obstacles hit, you gain access to better handling cars and more dangerous areas to drive in. Players who enjoy the burnout series of games will enjoy this as it turns the games’ twist on the genre into the main gameplay loop.”

The UX of this game should be more similar to the asteroids game than the platformer. I should make the player feel a sense of time pressure by making them juggle multiple objectives. However, instead of penalising players for improperly balancing their attention, they are rewarded for doing it effectively.

Let’s have a crack.

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Asteroids post mortem

The insights I could glean from the playtest were somewhat limited due to my existing intention to change the whole premise to align more with my elevator pitch but I still found improvable areas to carry over such as difficulty.

How the game ended up:

The player experience was mostly boredom at the pace of the game with a little confusion mixed in there from the undisclosed win condition to keep it interesting. The objective, however obscure, was to destroy 10 asteroids without colliding with asteroids yourself. The conflict, however minimal, came from the rules that colliding with an asteroid reduces your life count and reach 0 will lose you the game and the only procedures possible were moving towards the cursor position and shooting bullets in the direction of said position.

If I were to continue development on this game, I would revoke the procedure of shooting bullets and add more relating to close-range combat to create a more present sense of conflict. I have plans to add multiple conditions that must be satisfied for the player to claim victory. And as with the platformer, better kinesthetics and aesthetics will lead to a much better overall player experience.