Week 7: Mentor Feedback

After a few weeks, we met with out mentor, Ben Wander. A lot has changes since he gave his feedback last time. Previously, he had only seen our one-player prototype to test out the physics and basics of the pulling and pushing interactions. Now, however, he was able to play a few levels and tell us what he thought. He played with our teammate Nolan. The two of them played through our tutorial section which was about five levels.

From watching him play, we noticed that the jumping is still a little weird. It was hard to consistently jump up two blocks because of some friction on the walls. It was also clear that Ben did not understand the mechanics right away and said he wanted to experiment more before being thrown into an actual puzzle. We saw some other bugs while he was testing.

In terms of level design, Ben told us about how our spacing between platforms and gaps were ambiguous which lead to a lot of confusion of what he thought was the right way to complete a level. He said we should exaggerate distances that the player should not be able to make to make sure that they know which ways they shouldn’t and can’t go. To help make the level building process easier, we created a set of rules for how far or tall platforms can be and making sure we never use one of the “edge” cases where the player might think they can make it but actually can’t.

Another main source of tension was how precise the timing had to be when the two players were using their burst ability. Ben said that it felt too much like baseball. To try to counteract this, we thought of have a glide button so when falling, the player will fall much slower. Our hopes for doing this is to lessen the precision of timing by giving the players more time to react and see what angle the other is at when using their burst.

For the tutorial, he said we shouldn’t be afraid of making it too easy. The point is to get the players familiar with the basics of the game, in this case, the movement and physics. We have rethought out tutorial levels and made adjustments to other levels with his feedback. Overall, he seemed alright with it as a game. There is still a lot to do to adjust the physics and fix bugs, but it sounds like we are headed in the right direction.