This week was a busy week for the team. We had a tide schedule for massive playtesting of the first level and there were plenty of live improvements on the game as the team was receiving feedback along the way.
The main feedback was on the user feedback from the gameplay being a little bit confusing and indirect. The gameplay itself was pretty amazing. Initially the players tend to mess up with landmines and set them off with shocking sound effects. As they kept trying, landmines were removed one by one and this gave the players strong feeling of accomplishment which was the goal of the game. However, during the process, the guide for how to remove the landmines was not clear and the way of moving the robots was wired. The engineers worked hard to get these feedback implemented as the playtests were still going on. Here is a demo of how the game looks like after this week’s feedback.
This video also serves the purpose of a temporary tutorial for the game to future playtests. The team added additional visual feedback for the interactions and more sound effects to further enhance user feedback of all operations. The UI assets also got updated to make the icons easier to understand. The digging minigame was improved as well by having a clearer UI bar. There were a lot of other improvements as well. See the video for yourself.
Besides playtesting, the team spent a fair amount of time working on the potential menu for the game as well. The future menu should have the functionalities of creating lobby, go through tutorial and selecting levels. The engineers were implementing the feature for this week and hopefully to see it next week along with all the other improvements from this week’s playtest feedback.