Week 7 - Alpha Playtesting

This past week, our team was able to get playtesters to try out our game and give valuable feedback.

On Monday, we conducted playtests with students at UofT's Game Design and Development Club. This version was similar to the alpha presented last Friday, just with some minor bug fixes and tweaks. We got 5 people to play the game. The biggest common criticisms were the camera getting in the way, and the lack of visual communication. The camera, at the time, followed the pizza guy when they jumped. This made it more frustrating for the players to click on interactables (they would line up the angel, then the pizza guy jumps and suddenly they can't change it anymore) The visual communication issues came with not knowing when the pizza guy would jump, and not knowing when the windows and other interactables would automatically deactivate. There were also minor bugs that popped up throughout our playtests. There were also some positives though. Our players pretty much all independently said that they felt the game was addicting and just the right difficulty.  One playtester said, "I'm getting frustrated, but i don't want to stop playing!" while another playtester remarked that the game reminded them of Geometry Dash (which was one of our main inspirations!) It seemed like our core gameplay loop and level design were there, we just needed to polish it off and remove some of the unnecessarily frustrating aspects.

After this playtest, we adjusted accordingly. We fixed the camera so it only pans when the pizza guy *lands* on a high platform, or when they go completely off screen. The camera now stayed in one place while the Pizza Guy jumped around, and it was no so much easier to click on interactables. We also changed the windows so they turn more and more red as the windows stay open, becoming fully red when they are just about to close (and vice-versa for windows that start already open), and extended the level a bit further with new puzzles. There were other changes we wanted to add but didn't get around to; this week was a particular busy week for everyone on the team.

On Friday, we had another playtest session with the folks at Ubisoft. We didn't get any complaints about the camera, but one playtester still was confused about our window-staying-open indicator. We are considering making the indicator more explicit, with a small progress bar or something. It was also brought up that we should make it easier to see when the player is jump, by adding a metronome or something similar. We agree with this point, and were even planning on implementing it before the playtest had we enough time. By far the biggest feedback point was that we needed to do a much better job at onboarding and tutorializing the level. Right now, the game just starts and the first interactable is a window over a bush, which will kill the player if they mess up. Instead, we should have a small tutorial that shows the controls of the game, and then start level 1 with a couple easy interactables that won't kill you if you mess up.

This coming week, we want to add a tutorial and metronome, as well as conduct more playtests of our own to collect more data.