Playtest Report – Final Playtesting

6/9/2019, Final Playtesting Build:

Playtesting Feedback

Did you enjoy the game? (1 to 5 rating)

What parts of the game did you enjoy?

Are there parts of the game that you didn’t enjoy or would change?

More uses for the elements. Maybe in the final test. Opening doors should be an interaction.
I didn’t understand the ring puzzle
The text instructions were confusing at times and detracted from enjoyment/understanding.
Some of the buttons were unrecognizable until I was a specific distance away from the button. I couldn’t figure out the last one with the spinning wheels.

How challenging was it understand the objectives of the game?
(Scale of 1 to 7: 1 being very easy, 7 being very hard)

Are there parts of the game that you didn’t enjoy or would change?

How challenging was it to understand your abilities and how to use them? (Scale of 1 to 7: 1 being very easy, 7 being very hard)

Do you have any other feedback on the mechanics and objective of the game?

Don’t initially give fire mana in second room or tell player how to use it. Give them an opportunity to fill and figure out what to do to cement understanding. Fire+wood obstacle is clear enough as is.
A couple more hints would have helped me.
The text providing instructions was confusing at times. The font used for clues was problematic. In the current font, “Dials” can be misread as “Dias,” which is a problem because many of the puzzles are on or attached to diases. It took me significant re-reading to figure out what was meant. “On” can also easily be misread as “or.”
It seemed like it was really difficult for the pointer to recognize some of the objects as buttons. The wheels especially stopped being recognized as a button after I used it. For the tutorial, I think a smoother transition would have been helpful when moving through the doors, it was a bit jarring

How challenging did you find the puzzles? (Scale of 1 to 7, 1 being far too easy, 7 being far too hard)

Do you have any other feedback on the puzzles or the difficulty?

Instead of a lever to activate the lights, it would be more rewarding to use elemental powers to activate each light somehow.
I haven’t played modern games, so I don’t know if my input on difficulty matters. (Defender was the level of games I played.)
Placing the clues for the last puzzle in close proximity to the early puzzles can lead to confusion. One clue is actually directly on one of the first puzzles. Suggest changing the location of clues to be more relevant to gameplay. Also, it is very unclear that the pressure wheels for the fountain can be turned both ways. “Pressure ^^^” reads as one-way functionality.
I didn’t get the one with the wheels 😦

Did you encounter any problems while playing? (yes or no)

Are any bugs you would like the developers to be aware of?

You can’t reach the fan buttons from the front of the console. Have to walk around to the side.
Text font size is all over the place, which leads to an unpolished feel.
No critical bugs (except maybe dials/dias) but many quality of life improvements could be made there.
The buttons not being recognized. I couldn’t press any of the “move fan up” buttons

Do you have any other comments or feedback about this game?

The hints weren’t very useful. A,B,C,D positions were unclear. Using water to uncover hints was fun.
Adding a confirmation prompt or a text log for tips/tutorial advice could be beneficial. I accidentally closed one of the early messages, and was unable to replay the information I missed.
Cool game!

Positive Highlights:
- Cool, Interesting, etc. puzzles.
- Overall great graphics and ideas.
- Cool spells.
- Excellent Tutorial.
Negative Highlights:
- More uses for the elements.
- Tutorial exit doors should be interactable instead of automatic.
- The font for clues led to multiple misunderstandings.
- Controls could be smoother/frame rate should be improved.
- The final puzzle had bugs.
- Add more sounds, improve the lighting.
- Game breaks in pop up menu.
- Unclear how some puzzles work.
- Hard to understand what to do next.
- Space seems large for what’s in it. Probably because you wanted to put more in it.

We are changing out the models/textures for the final puzzle so that they actually correspond with the clues.
Considering changes to the font(s) for readability and polish (but likely won’t have time for implementation)
We believe some people may be staying crouched and not knowing it, leading to issues with panel heights. Considering adding a crouch indicator of some kind. (but likely won’t have time for implementation)
People are still struggling with the final door, but it seems like many did not find/investigate all the clues. We will discuss if there is some way to make the clues for enticing without leaving them completely un-hidden.

Admittedly, there currently isn’t an object to clean up with the air element in the game. The team was however starting to implement a pile of trash that would fly away but didn’t have enough time. During the paper prototyping phase, the team did consider making puzzle locked off until a previously unlocked element was used. An example would be the idea that the earth puzzle was frozen in ice that had to be melted by the fire element.
Framerate and performance issues on the MacBook Pro during the final in-class demo were discovered to be due to the demo being run in too high of resolution and graphics settings without the graphics card capabilities to support it.
WebGL performance is still questionable to say the least. The degree to which it affects the game seems to vary from computer to computer and browser to browser, but it can be quite bad. We determined that this is (at least in large part) due to a bug with raycasting in the Unity WebGL player/builds. We believe it is fixed in the latest 2018 branch of Unity but we are not updating due to class requirements and it being the end of the project/quarter.