MEA 300 Assignment 8: User Testing Report

The most common notes of feedback I got from my user testing form (12 people total) were:

1. The game is too slow/easy.
2. It would be more enjoyable to be able to move in all 4 directions.
3. Everything disappears if the player “rides” the wind far back enough.
4. No apparent goal: nothing happens when the player collects the pollen.
5. Make the birds attack in more than 1 section of the screen.

Despite these concerns, most of the users seemed to enjoy playing the game.

I got a lot of written compliments about the appearance of the flowers and hummingbirds, and when rated, the overall appearance of the game scored pretty high.

In order to address the more critical feedback, here are the changes I’ll be making to my game:

1. Implementing progressive difficulty: adding more birds to avoid.
2. Fix the winds (add a timer) so that they only take the player back so far. I don’t want the player to be able to escape everything just by taking advantage of the wind.
3. Add some sort of point/score system so the player can see how much pollen they gathered.
4. Fix the birds so they attack across the entire screen, not just in 1 lane.

I will not change the player movement: I intentionally programmed the game so the player can only move up & down. I feel that that adds to the game mechanics and adds a bit of a challenge.