Prototype First Reactions

Whoa so we showed the game to some people!

Yes my phone was put into the hands of a few other indie dev type people.  Without any explanation of what the game was or how to play. It was incredibly helpful to watch them.  Watch them like a total creeper.  Because the game is so basic they didn't have much feedback to give.  There were a few "Nice direction.  Good art" type comments. But the most important thing they told me wasn't something they communicated with their mouth face part.  It was the way they played the game.

It would be easy for me to be disappointed because they only played the game for about 30-45 seconds before handing it back.  But what they did when they played, man that was awesome.  They were focused, trying to figure out what to do.  They were fully absorbed, for 30 seconds.

One guy mashed the attack button.  One guy immediately walked across the game world and ignored!? the bottles.  Another guy tried to time his attacks carefully.  No one was able to break 15 bottles and clear the level.  (Not that they kept trying after they died.)

The takeaways from this:

• The bottles that go off the screen are too hard to anticipate for an absolute beginner
• There must be something preventing a player from continuing on in the level, some kind of obstacle that they have to overcome
• It's too hard for players to see the character right now, it's just a bunch of lines
• There's no sense of reward when they break a bottle, the tiny little 'flash' effect is barely visible
• The life bar is too hard to see or keep track of
• The character's attack trajectory is too hard to anticipate in relation to the bottle 
• As expected, without any sense of accomplishment or way to gauge their progression, or reason to continue, players have little interest in going multiple rounds or getting better.. 

So the next steps in development will be:

• Making the character's movement stationary/player dependent during left/right attacks
• Adding a 'tweeny' effect to the font (where the score number gets bigger and shrinks when they break a bottle)
• Changing the score font to something visible/exciting
• Throwing down some super rough values on the characters so they are vaguely more visible
• Changing the bottle throwing function so that I can optionally control the height of the bottle trajectory.  (To keep the first batch of bottles on the screen so that players can get used to them)
• Changing the bottle breaking sound so that the sound is different when they hit it, as opposed to when it hits the ground, or hits them
• Figure out how to make moving across the level harder/slower/staggered
• Add the Hud bg images

And of course, keep working on those animations @_@

Before I had a bunch of questions I wanted to ask people but now I just want to see them play.  Observational Scientist Mode Activated. O_O