Last Playtesting
I finished all the levels I could and wrote the save function. This way players will be able to get back into the game quickly when they accidentally quit. The game will unlock levels one after another to make sure players know where they are.
Then I have had my final playtest. This time the feedback has helped me to further improve the game’s interaction with the player and the player experience.
David gave me quite a bit of feedback to help me make each level of the game as good as possible.
Tester feedback:
- Struggled on level 7 ‘Deja vu’.
The player eventually solved the puzzle after I gave step-by-step hints. I gave clues to the idea of solving the puzzle both in the option button and in the narration. However, these clues are too cryptic and overwhelming to allow the player to understand the correct way to play the game. At the same time, the theme of the levels is so similar that the player loses sight of the meaning of Déjà vu.
As the puzzle involves the interaction of two levels, it is necessary to strengthen the connection between the two levels. In conjunction with David’s suggestion. I decided to rebuild the theme of both levels to make it distinct from the others and to be able to give the player a greater sense of Déjà vu the second time they see it. I chose the background of the Wheel of Transcendence option as the game’s setting as a way of suggesting that the player be aware of the time jumps. At the same time I added narration to further hint at the game’s solution. But again, it can’t be too obvious. I abandoned the idea of copying the option menu into a new level, as the steps are the same but the player is thinking from a completely different starting point.
- In the fruit ninja game, the player missed clicking start because he tried to slice it, and not sure if start appeared again.
This is really something I took into account when designing the level, the fruit and buttons are currently randomly generated at a certain rate, so the start button could appear at the beginning, or it could appear again dozens of times later. I didn’t fix this further at first, but I didn’t expect the problem to be so prominent that players would worry about whether the start button would reappear after they missed it.
Following David’s suggestion, I have added a count feature to ensure that a start button is generated at most every 15 times. Also when the start button appears, the player is prompted that they need to cut it to trigger the function.
- Jarvis voice recognition is limited
After the player tries to make a sound, the level doesn’t respond in kind. I assume that the voice recognition has been reduced after I enabled the volume pickup feature. I decided to add a few similarly pronounced words to the thesaurus to make the speech recognition function more responsive. Also in the previous revision, a narrator has been added in case the player doesn’t know what to say.
Final Version
After a few final changes, I have exported the final version of the game. Although it is missing about 5 or 6 levels compared to what I expected to design. However, the levels that I have so far all work harmoniously and the voice narration and actions fit the game logically. Apart from the artwork, which could do with further polishing (which is not my strong point), the remainder of the game looks well finished. At the same time it’s fun and meets my expectations of making a competent critical meta game.