Week 9: Playtesting and Work

This week we were able to build our first version of the game. You can check it out here. With this, we also were able to get some playtests.

Hai also was able to playtest with quite a few people. From those tests we found a lot of small bugs to fix. They mainly included issues with jumping and sliding, the panning camera speed, following camera harshness, and being able to move while the respawn/next level animation is going. Some other visual things that caused problems were the colors of buttons (red on magma red) and the grey doors.

Hai also noted that there were two levels that the difficulty ramped up on too greatly. These two levels were Magma 4 and 10. Hai thinks it is because on 4, the players are split up for the first time and were confused by that. Willie has added some levels to the magma sequence to try to solidify both the difference between the fixed and free magnets as well as the idea of being separated. Something that was surprising to us is that Hai told us that the play testers did not assume or know that the game was supposed to be cooperative. There were also some level design spacing issues.

As users never read anything, they ignored the tutorial text. To combat this issue Hai has the idea to have the directions as sticky notes in the background. Another idea is to have the player be able to toggle if they want hints in the main menu.

We sent out a build to a couple of friends and they played it using xbox controllers. This broke the control scheme but were still able to play it, just using different controls. Overall, they said that they liked the concept and the mechanics were easy to pick up, though it took them longer than desired to figure out that one could only pull and one could only push.

They also gave us input on the slow fall thing: they didn’t like it and felt that it was unintentional. They also said that when having a block or the other player in a vertical beam, they expected it to move when they moved.

Apart from testing, all of us kept working on things. Ben redesigned the character select menu and refined some of the menu sprites and interactions with Nolan’s help. Nolan has been working with Ari to get more songs and has been refining the Magma level set. This week, we all have been designing levels for the Mineshaft world, and Nolan will be thinking about the sequence for that too.

Willie has been working on the usual: bug fixing, minor changes to how the door works (horizontal doors!), finishing up character animations in Unity, and the ever present jumping fixes. Jumping has been the hardest programming problem so far.

Hai has been working hard on the first two cut-scenes and and remaining background art.

Currently, there are no sounds in the video but Nolan is working on it.