Devlog 9 - Taking direction

Here's a sketch that I put down randomly months ago just to capture an idea that I went back and referred to when laying out a new environment this week.

The week began with me getting a great amount of feedback from my very patient testers, and some things were made abundantly clear to me:

1. My current interface is not clear, is not intuitive, and is tedious to use. This isn't a great surprise to me because the game's design was torn in a few different directions for a while, and it's still taking shape. Getting the interface right is something that can't be finished until I know what the game is, and that takes time! But working on this has become my #1 priority now.

2. Trying to use subtext with gameplay elements is not working. That should be obvious, but it wasn't until I put the game in front of other people. There's a couple of things that I have been trying to do in a clever way, and absolutely nobody understood them. That's okay, UI and UX design are probably my biggest weaknesses, but I know this: I have to refocus everything towards clarity.

3. People seem to be more accepting of the game's tone than I expected. Somehow this was my biggest worry going into the prototype testing phase, and largely people were pretty okay with the tone, it seems. I'm still a bit too wordy, I need to give the players a bit more motivation, but I have spent very little time on any writing, and I believe I can fix those things.

4. I think the game's second area is more coherent than the first. The feedback on this was not unanimous, and I think some of this is absolutely because of UI/UX issues getting in the way, but I feel this way, and the shape of the feedback seems to imply this. The difference being: I designed the first area while I was still working out how the player's abilities work. I designed the second area once I had figured them out. Hardly a surprise that my ability to design around them has improved.

5. My coding is reasonably robust. After the first two lots of feedback came in, I jumped back into the project and made a number of changes to try and make the game less tedious and unclear for the third tester, and because all of my interactions are handled with pointers and functions, doing so was a matter of just an hour or so worth of tweaking. That's a good feeling! The only thing that broke was the final puzzle of the prototype, which I am probably going to cut and implement in a more clear manner.

I want to share one snippet from each of the three test reports that I got back that really helped me solidify an affirmative direction for me this week:

"A lot of vectors to "do" things and I fear it's confusing." This was an excellent way of summarising the problems very succinctly, and kind of condensed all of the feedback down to its core. I believe it's quite acceptable to give the player various vectors to do things, as long as those vectors are extremely clear, and the onboarding process is curated towards clarity also. That way players can operate with intent and make deductions and decisions and feel like they are in control, rather than trying to guess at what will happen.

"I wouldn't want the game to feel like it has a systemic core underneath it, but in fact the solutions be very linear." Perhaps the ultimate compass with which to steer this ship at all times - if you give the player a lot of options, and the game allows them to do all of those things, but the actual world interaction itself is entirely linear, then the systems have been largely squandered. I need to make sure that my gameplay design aligns with my systems design. There is some dichotomy here between the solutions based puzzle game and the exploration based adventure game that I have been trying to balance, and to have it stated this elegantly is so helpful.

"[ability] felt really good because it had absolutely no gameplay system connected to it. I did it just to feel good." This was exceptionally valuable to me because I had spent so much time trying to develop the systems that this had been my core focus, and it was wonderful to hear that and interaction I had put in just as an exploration of the world and character actually felt rewarding to a player. It reminded me that players aren't just here to "solve problems". Having systems that allow the player to interact in detail with the world is great, but some of those interactions should be just for exploration, even if it's the outcome of using an ability. Exploration is gameplay!

Summary

Okay, so let's sum all of this up. 

Nobody had fun playing the prototype. Everybody mentioned that they liked the ideas, that the core is good, but the UI got in the way, and the UX got in the way, and it was generally a frustrating, confusing mess. The UI cannot be saved, and so it's been thrown out completely and I've rebuilt it. I am okay with this, I was not attached to it at all after testing the game myself using it a number of times.

Everybody seemed into the setting. A few things to polish and tweak, but I always expect that. That means that I am building a world people want to explore, and that's always one of my biggest goals. I feel good about this. I would say that I didn't spend much time on this, but that's actually quite wrong, I have dozens of pages of sketches where I slowly developed the game's world, bit by bit, earlier in the year. That fact that it was so long ago just make it feel like it wasn't much effort - I definitely put lots of time into it.

People liked some of my cool visual effects, disliked others. I am an art man, not a design man, and so I want to put interesting visuals on everything. Sometimes that is annoying. That's okay, I can strip out most of the stuff people disliked without being too disappointed. Some of the visual things were just distracting. I don't want people getting distracted.

Having rebuilt the interface, I'm now building a gentler introduction to the mechanics. I expect that I will probably make it too hand-holdy. That's okay, I will accept feedback on that part and take it in my stride. I'm still finding out the shape of this game, and I've worked on enough games now to know that some of the best ideas take a while to emerge from a project. If everybody hated all of the mechanics and told me directly then I would accept that my ideas are bad, and scrap the project. That hasn't been the case, so I am grateful for the silver linings, and I shall do my best to address the rest!