Reflection #1
As I mentioned when submitting my design challenge, the game was adapted from a previous project that I had worked on. While the design challenge submission featured new levels and designs which more accurately fit the theme I selected, the underlying mechanics were mostly unchanged. That said, I didn’t design those mechanics over night, and I actually had a lot of people playtest it over the months and months that I worked on that initial project. Over the course of my time putting together the original project, I frequently had friends and family conduct playtests and I modified the game accordingly. The most useful playtester by far, however, was my dad.
My dad is relatively familiar with video games, and he’s actually the person who got me started on World of Warcraft all the way back in 2004. Unfortunately, despite the fact that he has played a lot of games over the years, he is hopelessly bad at almost all of them. My game, as it turns out, was no exception. This actually proved really useful though, as my dad’s inability to beat levels that I considered trivially easy made me realize the necessity of a difficulty setting. That said, my dad expressed that while he found the controls to be really intuitive and easy to understand, the rapid speed of the bullets is what made it hard for him. This resulted in me keeping the same health and damage values for both difficulties, with the primary change being the actual speed at which the bullets spawn and fly.
Another thing that my dad opened my eyes to was how I had implemented the attack animation in a relatively poor way. In the original versions of the game, I was using a sword as the character’s weapon, and the attack key caused the player to slash the sword in an arc directly in front of them. Since the animation happened at a fixed speed, I was able to accurately calculate how much health the bosses should have in order to make the fight last a specific amount of time. Within a few minutes of testing, however, my dad completely broke my game.
Since he has personal knowledge regarding game design within Unity, he quickly spotted a massive flaw in the way I designed my attack. Because I had been expecting players to only hit by pressing the attack key, I had simply coded the damage instance to happen once the sword model collided with the enemy model. Armed with this knowledge, my dad realized that he could just hover the sword model over the enemy, resulting in it dying within moments. My response to this was to add a condition to the code that forces the sword to exit the enemy model before it can deal damage another time.
On the very next playthrough, my dad opted to rapidly spin his character, causing the sword to enter and exit the enemy hitbox in quick succession, effectively achieving the exact same result. While this initially frustrated me, my dad told me that he actually found this style of attacking to be more fun, and that I should consider incorporating it into the actual game. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to change the sword to a hammer, and I made the attack pattern into a wild 360* swing rather than a slash. This de-emphasized aiming when attacking, which I somewhat disliked, but every playtester reported that it felt far more fun and intuitive, so I decided to keep it.
While this was all testing done for the original version of the game, I did actually have my dad test the new levels I created for the design challenge. He said that the game felt mostly the same (as expected), and he thought the concept was cool, but he disliked the fact that he had to constantly move in order to not get hit. I think he raises a very valid point, but seeing as how I designed the levels for the prompt of “Don’t Stop Moving”, there wasn’t a whole lot that I could do about it. I guess it goes to show that not every concept works for every type of player.
