Crab Meat: Questionnaire Followup
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read
This developer diary is following up on a previous diary also about questionnaires during the development of Crab Meat. Last time I spoke a lot about what I asked, this developer diary explains more on why I had to ask said questions.
- ‘From the intro, what do you think the game is about?’: I felt the need to ask this because during one of the playtests, someone skipped the game’s opening and had no idea that you were supposedly underwater or a crab and they said that the game was about ‘A ram pushing boulders’.
During development, we were unsure whether to force the player to watch the cutscene to understand what was happening or if we ever even needed the opening — We do want people to know what the game is about but at the same time, people don’t care about a story on a mobile game. Once people started saying that they didn’t know what creature they were playing as we felt that it was needed to change the opening so that they player had to watch it once and then they can skip it. - ‘How many levels did you complete?’: This question was designed to answer a few different questions in one question but arguably answered none of them clearly by doing so. I needed to know if some levels were too hard and people were just quitting. The idea was that if a heap of people finished around the same level range, it would mean that the particular section that they gave up in was either too hard or too easy. By looking at their answers to other questions, I could decide whether I thought their information they provided to this question would be valid or not. A lot of people started giving up in the 11–15 range — the level range where levels start becoming more complex and convoluted. I could have looked at the footage to see this but following the patterns of the past playtests, some recordings didn’t work or the quality was not clear enough. Upon receiving this feedback, I changed how the levels were designed — I tried not having so many different assets on the screen and make levels more square and branch out less. Doing that allowed for the camera to be zoomed in further and gave less different points and entities for the players to look at, doing this allowed more players to either complete the project or make it between level 16–20 instead of 11–15.
- ‘Did you understand how Ice worked?’: There was a debate within the development team about how clear it was that the ice blocks were doing something and how it actually worked. Our original idea was that we can have audio that changed in volume each time a player moved. As we were towards the end of development at this point, we wanted to keep the work to a minimum, so I was rather skeptical when a team member wanted to have specific blocks change in colour, another animal eating the player as a death animation for it and block animations depending on how many turns the player was on the ice. So we wanted to gauge just how clear it already was with just audio, so we would know just how many drastic changes we would actually have to make. People said that they don’t think Ice works in the way we had it set up and it made it confusing, so I added an Ice Block instantiating over the crab and added a delay to when the level resets — This made it clear to players that on that amount of turns, you die from freezing and the delay made it clear and more like an animation.
- ‘Do you or have you studied Game Design before?’: This question isn’t directly helpful for making changes to the project but it helped to know how useful the information from that particular player would be. Game developers and some other creatives look at a project and play it differently to an average consumer. Obviously, everyone’s input matters but it can help specify the type of change we’d need to make — If a game developer finds a mechanic confusing in comparison to an average consumer, it would mean that I’d have to make a change tailored to people in this line of work and vice versa.
- ‘What platform did you play on?’: This was another question that could be answered with footage but was made as a contingency plan to sub par footage. People have different expectations on each platform; For example. on gaming consoles and PC, people expect for a game to be played for hours on end and everything is there from your original purchase (typically). However, on mobile people expect a project to be played for 2 minutes and then they can come back to it another time and it’s not a big deal if the content is behind a paywall. This is another question that wasn’t directly helpful to the project but could help validate the given data as well as help find platform specific bugs — As people expect different things from the platform, I needed to know if I had to make changes to the project overall to cater for both platforms.
- ‘How did the music make you feel?’: The project was never meant to be a project that was rushed as it is turn-based with no timers, but when a team member conveyed to our audio collaborators that we wanted faster upbeat audio, we received music that would be found in a project where the player shouldn’t need to think about their moves and can just continuously do tasks. So this question was in the questionnaire to see how much the audio was influencing the player and if it followed what we specified in our documentation. Once we received feedback for this, the audio collaborators went back and slowed the tempo down and had lower pitched instruments, this changed how people felt and made them feel a bit calmer.