Over this past week, we were able to conduct three playtests. From last week’s sketches, we create a rudimentary level sequence so that the players could navigate to the goal and interact with one another and the world. As a team, our primary goal from this test was to see what players thought about the player-player interaction, but is also worthwhile to have more eyes on our project now rather than later. This means that visual signals are very important in understanding the gameplay and have an effect on the player experience.
Playtest Summary
Visual
Even though we are planning to add art later because it takes time to make, the overall play experience is made easier through visuals. This was apparent as all playtesters suggested to add visual clues including: death animation/transition, beam activation, burst activation, aiming direction, metal box sprites,
Gameplay
Overall, all players liked the interaction between themselves and the other player. They thought it was fun that they could pull or push one another, which is good for us. However, there were some comments about the magnetism. A few players did not know why there was the burst and the beam, or didn’t see how having both would be useful; they thought the beam was just a subset of the burst. We also got feedback that in general, the physics should feel “snappier,” which means more initial inertia when magnetizing blocks and some tweaks to the jumping (though we got mixed feedback on the floatiness of it). In one playtest, the players thought the cardinality of the beam was annoying and expected it to have 360 degrees motion, but the others did not have this issue.
There was also concern for the level design. Right away, players should be confronted with a challenge and not have to be herded through a “path” to the goal. The idea that both players need to reach the ending is something that we should talk about because it seems shallow if only one player has to do the puzzle.
Bugs
During the playtests, we encountered two gamebreaking bugs. If the player jumps and collides with a wall, they would clip into the wall and not fall. Also, there was some “residual” magnetic forces interacting on the player so that if one player pulled the other and then stopped, the force still acted on the pulled player. Another bug we came across was that if the puller got on top of a block and pulled towards it, they could fly with it. We also found a problem where sometimes landing on the ground wouldn’t reset the player’s ability to jump, which could be an issue with the tilemap.
Playtest 1 Notes
- Wanted more visual cues
- Fix the increased momentum when touching something while midair
- Fix wallhanging
- “I don’t understand why I need the L2”, he later changed his mind on this
- Add longer cooldown on L2
- Neither thought it was “too much” having both the directional beam & burst
- Some parts of the tilemap don’t allow jumping?
- Differentiate characters very clearly
- Make everything less floaty, make physics “snappier”
- Suggested the beam should have high initial energy, and a lower energy when sustained
- Make everything “punchier”(above)
- Suggested a mechanic where the players couldn’t get within a certain distance of each other?
- Suggested sticky blocks
- Fix being able to fly on blocks
- Suggested adding positively and negatively charged blocks, would behave differently for each player
- Liked being able to move each other
Playtest 2 Notes
- Fun to interact with one another
- Can’t jump bug
- They thought that, since they had the pull ability, they could pull themselves to the other player instead of pulling the other player to them. The player with the push ability did not make a comment
- Direction beam is annoying, the cardinality is weird
- Can pull through walls, but can’t move and have the metal block move with the player (pull ability only)
- So buggy that it was hard to get an honest play through, focusing on the bugs
- Not a lot of teamwork with the levels that we implemented, it became a race to the end, the interaction was still entertaining to push and pull the other
- Expected a 360 degrees beam, not cardinal
- Controls are weird, moving the thumb from aim to jump was hard (inexperienced gamer), but agree that if the user is forced to do this a lot, it could get annoying
- In levels, less is more, have only one solution, and not so “path-y”. Have the player look, stop, and think rather than just run to the puzzle area
Playtest 3 Notes
- Liked that the player’s targeting stays where it is
- Wants some sort of “death animation.” It doesn’t need to be an actual animation, but just something to signify a player has died. He wasn’t a fan of the instant snapping that we have now
- Thought it could be cool to have a solo mode where one player can control both characters
- Likes the way jumping feels, thought the collisions felt good
- suggested a “self-destruct” feature, where one player could hold down a button and Respawn (either only that player or both players)
- Got stuck in corners (we have a fix for this now, it just wasn’t implemented in the levels we were testing on)
- Mentioned to be constantly aware of the difficulty curve, balance between boredom and frustration. He suggested we design levels with an “intended number of attempts” the players would need to beat it
- Suggested a “look” button, where players could pan the screen around to get a better feel for their surroundings
More Process
In addition to playtesting, we spent the week making more art assets, implementing sprites in Unity, big fixing (of the above), and working more on the visual side of the menus.
Our narrative is that Knife is one of the many cats that are test subjects for a scientist experimenting with magnetizing lifeforms. In order to keep the other cats company, the scientist made Refrigerator, a robotic cat who is also has magnetic abilities as it was an early prototype. Knife manages to escape her cage and then both her and Refrigerator fall into a trash shoote and end up deep in the Earth’s crust. They must climb through obsidian, sedimentary rock, caves, mine shafts, and sewers to resurface.
From the feedback from Ben Wander, Hai created the metal blocks with symbols associated with whether they will move or the player will move when they are magnetized. She made several which are themed for the obsidian, sedimentary, sewer, and mine shaft layers of the level progression. Here we have the fixed block, movable block, and block on rails from left to right, respectively.
Hai also finishes up some animation sprite work, including the jump, beam activation and the push/pull burst.
Ben worked on adding the lab tilesheet and the above sprites into Unity. He also investigated in-game sprite pixelation, and created UI sprites for the character select menu. Both he and Willie imported levels from sketches conducted playtesing. Willie also worked on fixing bugs.
After hearing from another student who is interested in making music for games, Nolan started brainstorming the vibe that we wanted for our game music. He also added more sounds into Unity, in addition to working on the menu screen.
Level Sketches
Capstone Magnet Game 