Week 6 playtesting

We didn't have the systems in place to do good a/b testing for this week, but got some basic feedback that we're using to guide this week's semimajor overhaul. The consistent issues that have come up are a lacking sense of player control and insufficient feedback from the game. A key complaint regarding character control is the inability to move without jumping. We had considered that aspect of the controls something that differentiated our game's feel from similar competitive games, but will have to let it go if the quirkiness doesn't justify the accompanying imprecision.

Testers had complaints about a lack of feedback in two areas: hitting the ball and scoring. Players had no idea how the character's body was divided into hitboxes or how the ball was meant to behave when hit in different ways. As it is now, no one playing the game could be expected to figure out there are three distinct areas of the body that affect the ball differently. Player were able to tell when they had scored, but found the effect underwhelming. Specific feelings about how we should enhance the effect were mixed, particularly on the subject of whether or not the ball should reset its position after a score.

The feedback wasn't all bad, though. The game's speed and the brightly colored character sprites were well received.

Here's some changes we're going to try out for next week:


  1. More straightforward directional movement controls.
  2. Reduce our current three hitboxes to just two.
  3. Make the goal-seeking shot more apparent by moving it to the head, which is prominent on our sprites, and adding a visual effect and sound.
  4. Make the ball bounce off stationary players
  5. Add sound in general. The game is totally silent still.
  6. Ball resets after a goal.
  7. More visually interesting depiction of the score including animation.
  8. New art for the goals to bring them in line with the rest of the game's appearance + goal animation
  9. A victory screen.
  10. Background animations.

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