Reflection #3
Since this game, like my first game, was another digital game, for play testing I just had some of my family members (AKA my siblings) go on my laptop to try out the turn-based combat game that I created. That being said, my siblings don’t really play turn-based combat games at all, so in order to also get feedback from someone in more of a target audience, I sent the game footage to one of my friends who is an avid Earthbound fan, Earthbound being the inspiration for the battle style.
As stated above, the game setup was digital. To make it, I tried my hand at coding in Java, and used an old version of Eclipse to code it. I had actually already attempted to make this in my High school coding class, so for this I dusted that off and finished it up to the best of my ability. I figured making it out of Java would be nice too because of how this semester I was taking a Java class.
Overall responses for the game were pretty positive. As I originally thought from playing the game myself, it actually did have a bit of a challenge element to it, in which I have to say actually did take a while to find that perfect balance. Anyways, the game successfully starts off decently easy, then grows to get significantly harder as you ascend through the levels. After doing the first, easiest enemy fight, my play testers were able to figure out what each thing did and how they were suppose to play the game. I was told, however, that it would be significantly harder to figure it out on your own without me over their shoulder explaining the setup to them, but that’s what a tutorial would be for in an actual game.
One thing that surprised me during their gameplay was when they decided to explore the world outside of the battle system a little bit. There was of course nothing really there besides the enemy squares and the walls, but one of my testers showed me that you could actually force all of the objects in play to move if you pushed against one of the walls enough. It would basically throw everything off by a few pixels the longer you pushed. It was a strange bug that I didn’t anticipate at all until someone found it for me.
Other than that bug, my players actually said it was a pretty fun and challenging experience. No one was able to defeat the final boss though. I mean, I managed to do it myself after a few tries but my testers never made it that far. I was happy to see that all of the main game mechanics functioned very well (besides the outside world area, but I didn’t develop that much anyways).
If I had to change something, I’d at least try and make images work instead of just drawing basic squares and rectangles. I’d also try to add music. With those two things, the game would definitely have much more of an interesting atmosphere to it.
