In the first installment of the analysis mini-series of the results of the playable prototype survey, I looked at the multiple-choice answers and tried to draw conclusions about what the players did, and whether that was what I wanted them to do. In part two, I will examine the written answers to the questions about what the players liked, disliked, and were confused about.
Good news:
None of the respondents seemed completely and utterly confused by the game and what is going on in it; In fact, a few of them said they weren't confused at all! This is actually a big deal: before I made a few minor modifications to this same prototype, people had a lot of trouble understanding what's going on and what they are supposed to do next. I think the most important modification I made was changing the duration of each cutscene and instruction frame from 1 second to 2 seconds. This allows people to take in everything that's being thrown at them and it still maintains a frantic, chaotic pace (which is one of my goals for the game). I also added more cutscenes, instructions, and clarifications before and after mini-games, which seems to have helped a lot, but there is still room for improvement on that front (more on that later)
More good news:
A lot of people liked a lot of the things I was hoping they would like! The crowd favorite was the slapfighting, with 7 people mentioning it as a favorite. The footprint-following mini-game was a close second, with 5 votes. This is really cool to me, because these two games are quite different: a really simple but funny game with really straightforward outcomes, and a game that offers strange new gameplay and outcomes that may or may not be desirable based on the context of the game (e.g. are you trying to chase someone or trail them?). And yet they both worked really well in this setting!
People also enjoyed the pac-man and searching for exit mini-games, the persistent items as exemplified by the sword you could find and use, and the whole "story progression and overworld made out of discrete minigames" deal.
The not so good:
There was a lot less agreement and a lot more variety in what people people found confusing or not enjoyable. One of the common sources of confusion seems to be the goal of the game, where one is supposed to go, and what is going on in general. This is partially by design - this is, after all, supposed to be a hectic, "controlled chaos"-style game with a fairly abstract storyline. But I feel like the game does still need more cutscenes, instructions, and cues in place so that it remains fun. I think that we need to have cutscenes at the beginning and end of each mini-game to create a frame of reference about what you just did and how it affected the world and story. We also need more clear instructions for each game, and more moment-to-moment feedback, like progress bars in mini-games and a "next goal" indicator on the overworld map.
The other big thing people were confused about or displeased with was the foot-car mini-game. It has two major problems, both of which I was already aware of, but did not have the time to fix. The first problem is that unlike all the other mini-games, there is not instruction screen before the foot-car game that prepares you and tells you what you're supposed to do. Instead, at the last moment, I put an animation of alternating right and left keys right into the game. (The way that I've hacked together the sequence of events in the demo prevented me from easily putting in a proper instruction screen)This actually helped a lot (before that, players had no clue at all what they were supposed to do there!), but there's still no consistency or time for players to get ready and find the right keys. For the final game, we'll make sure to add instructions to the mini-games themselves so that all of the games will have their own instructions before the game starts.
The second problem with that game is that there are no consequences to the game whatsoever. There is nothing the game accomplishes, and you move to the map location you were traveling to regardless of whether you actually get to the finish line. One of the players called it an "interactive loading screen", and that's pretty accurate. My plan for how travel is supposed to work is a little more elaborate than just making people press left and right for five seconds, though: if the player does not get to the finish line in time, he will have to make camp for the day in the middle of the road. This means playing another mini-game. The "camp" mini-games would include things like sword-sharpening, reading books, and inventory tetris. Playing these games should give the player some kind of bonus, so even though he took more time to get to his destination, he got something else out of it. I'd also like to add other events to the traveling mini-games itself, like being waylaid by enemies or finding random items in your path.
Surprisingly, only two people caught on to (or at least cared about) the fact that every time you fight a slime in the dungeon, you get placed in a new random dungeon afterwards instead of going back to the spot you were before. This was another hack to speed up the development of the prototype, since I didn't want to implement the functionality to pause an existing mini-game (the maze) and start a new one on top of it (the fight), so I just got rid of the old maze completely whenever you had to do something new like fight a slime. Sorry! We are putting that functionality in the "real" architecture.
So overall, I'm pretty happy with the feedback I got from the game. I feel like the proof-of-concept stage was pretty successful, and people are understanding and enjoying this weird "mini-game story" format. I got some valuable feedback about what works, what doesn't, and the kinds of things I need to be careful about to keep the game from getting too confusing.
In the next post, I will look at the story aspect of the prototype. How well this format works for storytelling, how people interpreted the story, and what kinds of things help or hinder the player's understanding of the narrative.
No comments:
Post a Comment