Week 5/ Testing Summary



Town rebuild

Rebuilding the town to allow for a better player experience by having a flat for the town, making the roads clear with the terrain and switching to Forward+ Rendering pipeline.

Grass implementation

Old grass

New grass

Utilizing unity's terrain editor and custom shaders that changes the color based tom the terrain color and is animated to look like the swaying in the wind.

Enemy AI wandering behavior and player detection

Enemies now roam the region, following the player only when spotted. They abandon the chase once they reach a certain distance from the player.

Respawn implemented

Using  Modern UI Pack 

Scriptable items

Asuka developed a reusable system that enables straightforward item and weapon implementation, allowing for a high degree of customization. This system also manages the animations and various aspects of the items' usage.





Testing summary

During this week's evaluation session, we gleaned critical feedback and insightful recommendations. These are instrumental in shaping our upcoming development phase, focusing specifically on areas that maximize the return on our endeavors. Testers appreciated the graphics and technical aspects of our game. However, we acknowledged the necessity to concentrate on providing player with a goal and that we had overlooked gameplay in favor of mechanics.

Problems

Major Bugs or Issues:

  1. Walking through objects in the geometry: Several play-testers noted that the player and cars can pass through rocks and other objects.
  2. User Interface (UI) issues:  specifically involving resolution of itch.io deployment made UI not visible for certain screen sizes and people using trackpads had trouble selecting items in the hot-bar.
  3. General collision detection issues: Similar to the geometry problem, collision detection seems to be a recurring issue.

Suggestions

Gameplay Improvements:

  • Maintain momentum when running over someone: A suggestion to improve the physics or game mechanics.
  • Increased focus on gameplay: A recommendation to shift the development focus more towards enhancing gameplay elements.
  • Increase car speed and player ability to run: To make the game more dynamic and engaging.
  • Add guns or more weapons: Expanding the weapon arsenal could make the game more interesting.
  • continuation of momentum after running over an enemy.
  • Need to include more guns or weapon options.
  • Focus more on gameplay.
  • Allow players to run faster.
  • Increase the car's speed for better gameplay experience.
  • Add crosshair.

Areas That Went Well

Visual and Technical Aspects:

  1. Impressive technology: Play-testers acknowledged the game’s impressive tech foundation, though they noted it still needs to evolve into a complete game.
  2. Cool art style: The visual appeal of the game is well-received, with multiple positive comments on the art style.
  3. Sound and visual investment: There is significant praise for the investment in both visual and sound aspects of the game, making it immersive and engaging.

Overall Experience:

  1. Enjoyable driving mechanics: Despite some issues, the driving aspect of the game was enjoyable for many.
  2. Potential for greatness: Play-testers see a lot of potential in the game, noting that it feels like it’s still in the concept phase but has impressive elements.
  3. Large world: The game’s expansive world is appreciated, though play-testers suggested adding more activities to do within it.

Feedback overview

  1. Play-testers expressed enjoyment in fighting enemies but had difficulty accessing the hot-bar for switching weapons.
  2. Many testers mentioned the lack of clear objectives, which could be a potential area for improvement to enhance player engagement and direction.
  3. There were a couple of comments that mentioned scope creep and throughout mentions the impressive technical mechanics but emphasized that we needed to focus on gameplay to make it an actual complete game with gameplay rather than a tech demo.

Game development actions to remedy mentioned issues and feedback 

Issues organized by importance:

  1. Issue: Lack of Gameplay and Goals for Players

    Planned Actions: A brainstorming session will be held to develop a basic fetch quest for gathering items such as supplies from the world.

  2. Issue: The weapon didn't perform as anticipated 

    Planned Actions: We intend to concentrate on ensuring the weapons operate effectively.

  3. Issue: Difficulty in Interacting with Objects

    Planned Actions: A crosshair or dot will be implemented to facilitate easier targeting in the interaction system.

  4. Issue: Geometry Collision Issues

    Planned Actions: Colliders will be added to all objects, with a special focus on set pieces.

  5. Issue: controls ambiguity

    Planned Actions: Update and enhance several controls, chiefly designing a UI notification popup that will demonstrate to the player the less intuitive key controls such as initiating the car. Ensure that the control scheme is updated comprehensively, as the feature to hold shift for running was unintentionally omitted.

  6. Issue: UI Problems

    Planned Actions: To be determined.


Graphs showing most of the results from the 1-5 rating questions:



Raw testing Data :https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ExFrGg-pHGQHJq63pLWPr8vivw4C01ipEfBnN4VJ...

Improvements post Testing:

  • Vehicle no longer stops abruptly when hitting an enemy but still could use some tweaking

  • Environment rebuild to help with road and building placement
  • Now using mesh colliders on buildings and added colliders to all relevant items fixing the players being able to walk through objects and set pieces

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