Week six update:
This week we focused our efforts into finishing up our first testable prototypes, then getting them in front of people to playtest.
Our first round of playtests was an internal session, getting other ETC students to play through our puzzle progressions and give us feedback on what they thought needed improving. Although not our target audience, we got good responses from other students who have experience in UI design, game design, and programming. The full working feedback document can be found here. Some of the standout comments we got though, were:
- Control for applying the loop is inconvenient.
- There should be a delete button for individual commands.
- There should be some sort of reward from finishing a puzzle.
- There should be a way to measure depth – how do we make the units a block will move, something apparent to the player?
With these major comments in mind, we began brainstorming solutions (red text in the document) that we would be able to implement before spring break on the 10th.
(Tutorial progression)
Our second round of playtesting took place at the ALICE Bootcamp on March 3rd. This was an event at the Carnegie Library in East Liberty (Pittsburgh), that introduces students of all ages to the ALICE software and help them begin to develop their own games on the platform. We had the opportunity to sit down with some students, ages ranging from 5 to 16, and get their thoughts on our prototype so far.
(Demo progression)
Many of the comments we got from the students, were consistent with what we heard from our ETC classmates. However, in addition to those, we also began to realize that our platforming segments, and the price for replaying puzzles was incredibly punishing (re-inputting commands, and getting reset to checkpoints after failing platforming segments doesn’t encourage players to keep going).
Moving forward, we compiled all of this feedback in order to most efficiently work for the final week before spring break and GDC week.