Play-test Reports

5/23/2019, Alpha Build:

We asked a friend to playtest the game and asked them several questions afterwards. Here are the questions and the responses:

What do you think of the difficulty of each puzzle?

• The fountain puzzle was confusing.
• The fireplace puzzle was confusing until I understood that the buttons were buttons.
  • Decent memorization puzzle was good.
• The earth pillar was really simple. Could be used as the tutorial for using buttons.
• Last door, I was tinkering with it and got all the lights to pop up but not sure where to go from there <Dev Note: the door was bugged>

Is the cleaning fun or tedious?

• Cleaning is a good mechanic if it had its uses:
  • Clues for the fountain puzzle hidden underneath burnable debris.
  • Consider indicating what can be used to clean something when hovering over the thing to clean, though this could also be done in a tutorial.

How easy to use was the interaction system? What could be improved on it?

• Interaction system was kinda bad — the hit-box for a lot of things were kinda wonky, like the cursor placement detection.
• I also think the mouse sensitivity is super high. Dial that down a little.

Extra remarks:

• I think the fountain needs clues and a specific way to turn it on. Keep the clues hidden in those boxes that you have to burn or something.
• The dirt on the fireplace should probably be able to be dusted off by the air element.
• Using air would allow you to solve the fireplace puzzle before the water because you wanna dust off the dirt on the fireplace and then get the element, burn the boxes and get the clues for the fountain.
• Should probably label the buttons but that’s for the future

Based on this feedback:

• We’re going to try and add more in world indicators to the fountain like arrows on the valve wheels and an upward arrow next to the water gauge.
• The fireplace puzzle will have its buttons be more differentiated from the lights.
• The earth puzzle was already considered too simple and will be made more difficult, most likely by increasing the number of ways to rotate it and using a more complex model.
• The final door was bugged so that will be fixed.
• In addition to the previously mentioned improvements to the fountain puzzle we think having introductory text that will give some background and a direction to start in towards the fountain, will reduce some of the initial confusion.
• While we don’t think cleanable objects will need indicators for which element to use, the soot object and other things like it will need to be clearly recognizable as caked on ash versus dust that people think should be blown away using air. So adjusting the soot’s color to be darker is probably needed.
• We’re going to decrease the size of the boxcast used for interaction probably down to a raycast to reduce the unwieldiness of the system.
• Mouse sensitivity is very subjective and can be adjusted by the player currently, so implementing a game specific senstivity slider isn’t a high priority.
• Again we believe the lack of the intro text caused confusion on where to start first. The sequence of fountain, fireplace, earth pillar, air machine, and final door will not change currently.