Play Testing and Feedbacks

The following are the summaries of feedback gathered from teams that play tested our game, as well as our solutions to the issues raised.

Team 3: Fraser’s Adventure Professionals

Issue 1. Pressure pads did not have a suitable sprite, i.e. was only grey in colour. They were really hard to see when playing the game.

Solution: Added a sprite to the pressure pads, so that they fit into the scene backgrounds and are more visible.

Issue 2. Level design is not mature enough that players can get stuck at a state and not able to revert back, i.e. the obstacles and collaboration objects are in a state that the players cannot change, such as the positions of the seesaw and pushable boxes.

Solution: Added additional feature to the reset button, so that it does not only reset the character positions, as well as the position of the objects in the scenes so that players can re-interact with them.

Compliments:

The collaboration mechanism is really fun. Especially the physics of the seesaw, pulley and pushing boxes to trigger events.

Team 8: UniTeam

Issue 1. Game too punishing, no 'checkpoints', e.g. in level 1 room 3, once both players go down the topmost platform they cannot get back up. Once the 3 lives run out the players had to start from the beginning of the level, could be better to start the individual rooms.

Solution: The games are made punishing on purpose with the mindset to force the players to think, i.e. once the players attempted something, and realised that it does not work, they would not try it next time - we think this would improve their critical thinking abilities by reflecting on past experience and learn from them. However, this also resulted in the negative effect of making the game less fun and "annoying" to play.

We considered making every room restartable after the players die. However, this would contradict with the leaderboard mechanism where time used to complete each level is regarded as the final score for that level. If players were to be able to restart a particular room after running out of lives, the final score would not be reflective of the players actual performance. Instead, we solved this problem by giving the players 7 lives instead of 3, making the game play more lenient.

Issue 2. Some non-puzzle game elements are too hard, e.g. water in level 1 room 2 is too wide, some jumping distance between platforms in level 1 and 2 are too 'precise' to get right.

Solution: These punishing game elements do not contribute to enhancing players critical thinking abilities, therefore these elements are adjusted and made more lenient so that the difficulty resides more in critical thinking as opposed to pure game mechanics.

Issue 3. The controls for the game are complicated, e.g. having to use 'i' for inventory, 'k' for character profile, 'e' to pick up items, 'esc' to pause and 'space' for NPC dialogues.

Solution: A direct attempt to solve this problem is to get rid of unnecessary controls. We have removed the need to pick up items with keys, instead players automatically pick up items when they are near them. We also changed the key to open character profiles to 'c' so that it is more intuitive than 'k'. Furthermore, we incorporated a controls page on the welcome screen as well as the pause screen, ready for players to revisit anytime.

Unfortunately, we did not have enough time in the end to change or explain the controls for the mini game in the final release, as the mini game was developed separately. We have documented the mini game controls here on our GitHub.(https://github.com/wilmol/SE306_Project2/wiki/Mini-game-design-guidelines)

Compliments:

Game graphics are pleasant and well fitted with the theme and background music, providing a good platform experience. The mechanics were evident, and meshed well with the level design. The cooperation mechanism was really emphasised and leveraged in the level design.