Devlog - Testing

Whilst the week 12 play testing session and survey gave people the opportunity to give me direct feedback, I found the most valuable feedback was non-verbal and through watching others play through and seeing that what did not function as intended. As most of the things that require revolving weren’t necessarily bugs but issues of direction and guidance that caused people to play through the game differently than intended:

The most common issue people had was struggling to figure out the controls as the UI instructions were not clear enough, while player figured out movement and jumping using A, D, and SPACE they weren’t utilising the ability to run or double jump. To fix this I simply made a dialogue window that instructs the player on all the controls right at the beginning of the game, the window can be reopened multiple times and only toggles off after all the instructions have bean read so players can try the controls as they read them. It also includes an instruction to return to the apartment to end the day. The second common issue occurred almost immediately on starting the game, players were choosing to end the day and go to sleep straight away, missing all of the dialogue, interactions, and mini games of the first day. This was happening because the player spawns right next to the scene progression prompt,  and there was no warning that you couldn’t return. In conjunction with the instructional dialogue window, I made the scene switch indicator appear AFTER the instructions were completed and toggled off, and the first “go to sleep” prompt issues a warning before proceeding.

While observing players I noticed many would start the dialogue from the indicator but then just walk off, not realising the dialogue continued past the first line. To fix I just added a small (e) indicator to the bottom right of the dialogue windows at the end of each line of text to prompt players to continue. 

Lastly, depending on the type of player, some people were staying on the ground not attempting to jump onto anything. Whilst there’s nothing majorly important up on the roof tops, there is still internal dialogues that give insight to Bean’s state of mind and a few character interactions.  I was very happy to see that once I added a small bit of dialogue challenging people to get up on the roof, that is immediately what they did. Only once people were jumping up on things did I realise I needed to add a few more platforms around town to make it a little easier for people.

Some bugs found during the play test session were minor issues of rendering or spelling errors that were easily resolved, as well as one large bug which switched cameras on the incorrect trigger causing the player to miss a conversation due to looking at geese. 
- Pigeon rendering through a character
- Dialogue boxes positioned too low and hard to read because they were covered by the player
- Music stopped playing during Huntin Season
- Dialogue windows not closing (due to unassigned variables in the inspector so just an oversight)
- A barrier missing in one scene so the player fell out of the world

Ending with things gone right, here is my housemate losing at Huntin Season 2: Revenge Of The Ducks for the 12th time:

Have a soupy day :)