Welcome to the final blog of my game engines course!
In this blog I will be going over the presentation day for our game. I wanted to talk about the feedback we received from the people who played our game during the demo day. In this blog I will also talk about the feedback we received in general over the course of the semester from people who played it or at least had the chance to see it.
Our studio had a couple sessions of live streams that showed the development of our game. In our first stream we showed lots of people what our game looked like and how it plays. When people saw this stream, we were three weeks away from the final demo day. Their input was very useful to our future development of the game. Some of the input we received during the first stream consisted of having more visual feedback for the player. We also got positive feedback on the overall idea of the game as people were saying this is a creative game that not many people have seen before.
Since the viewers of the stream could only see the game they did not get to experience the feel of the controls or hear any of the audio. With this problem in mind, we took our game to the lab where we got others in our program to play the game. This way they got to hear the game and feel the controls. From this, we had our play testers say the controls were not responsive enough. With this feedback we went back to our physics component of the engine and tweaked the forces being applied to the player's helicopter. Initially, we just increased the force applied and they liked it. The controls were much more responsive and they enjoyed it more. However, we had a better idea. We modified the throttle of the helicopter so it had would return to a hover after using full throttle. This fixed the problems people had with trying to shoot and fly at the same time. We changed the forces applied to the helicopter to only affect the thrust of the throttle. This provides the flying of the helicopter to still be responsive.
After showing our game in the lab, we wanted to show our game to Dr. Nacke, our game design professor, and see what he had to say. His feedback was very useful to us as he said that we need a tutorial. He tried to play our game and even with us telling him the controls he still couldn't work the basic mechanics of flying and shooting. He also wanted to play the game with a controller and felt the game would be easier if there was one. This was actually common feedback from lots of people who played our game and we plan we to implement that next semester to give us the ability to send physical feedback to the player as well as making it easier to play the game.
So with a tutorial in mind and less than a week until we present the game on demo day, we set out to put together a tutorial for players to learn the ropes of our new game. We decided to make another live stream while we created it to get more feedback for the best tutorial. As we did this we got even more comments and critiquing from our peers and even this one random guy from the states. People were telling us lots of ways of presenting the mechanics of the players that we really liked so we took the ideas down and saved them for next semester. For now, we used text with Chrystal reading it for our tutorial. We broke down the basic mechanics of flying into small steps so the player didn't feel overwhelmed with all the controls.
This turned out to be quite effective when we finally got to demo day! At demo day, three weeks after we started getting others feedback, we had not made many changes to the internal engine of our game. All changes made were regarding gameplay. The gameplay systems for our game should have been done in scripts similar to how Vandelay Industries' game Etesian did it so we could have been able to add, fix, and tweak gameplay mechanics more efficiently. Instead, our gameplay system was just plastered across the classes within the gameplay components of our engine such as the player, level, and enemy classes. It was messy but got the job done. We plan to clean up most of the gameplay code this holiday break so it is more organized and easier to read. Code like this is what I like to call crunch code.
To end this blog off, I want to say one more time, thank you to all of those who gave us their time to look at and play our game. We really appreciate all of your feedback and help with making our game that much better. Also, I really enjoyed the game engines course, I learned a lot of the internal systems of an engine as well as different ways to set up an engine of my own.
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