Overview Of This Week

This week, it was very important to play test my game and write a report on how the game had performed. As well as that, I got to implement different scenes into my game.

Coding Project: Zombie Killer Boom Boom

Before the initial testing of the game, I was able to add the different scenes such as the title screen, instruction screen, main play scene and a game over screen. All will be shown below:

As well as making a final version of the game that I thought was ready for testing, my game is now officially able to be played online. The game is subject to changes compared to this week if the game is going to be further developed.

The link to the game: https://www.dannymills.nuacomputerscience.co.uk/game/Runner.html

game report

I had to sample participants and play test my video game to see if the aims that I set out to achieve were successful as well as finding out things that I wouldn’t have expected during the design process. It ended up being a major success for me as the feedback was very useful for my video game.

There were 14 participants that took part in my study of the game. All my basic aims that I set out to achieve were met. The majority of the stretch goals, which were put in place to push myself during the short process of making my own video game, were also achieved. There were many useful results; the key results that I took away were the difficulty of the game as well as useful information from the qualitative data that I collected.

Before going through a few of the results, I must ensure that the anonymity of the participants will remain and no email addresses or real names will be used.

Firstly, A majority of the participants thought that the game was hard or very hard.

This was really good as this was the intention of what I was setting out to make. I made my game like this because I really respect the difficulty from From-Software games such as the Dark Souls series and more. I never used to want to play hard games but, after playing Dark Souls 3, it changed me as a player as well as my lifestyle outside of gaming. This amount of respect for these games made me want to replicate this in my small game prototype. Of course, there were participants that didn’t like the huge difficulty of my game but it wasn’t meant to appease to everyone such as the Souls-Borne games.

Finally, I received very useful information from the open-ended questions that I used in my questionnaire. 24% of the participants were color-blind in my test and all of them had some sort of difficulty identifying the different zombies. This is because the different types of zombies were differentiated by color and not different types of characteristics. I also gained greater insight on how to balance my game. There were repeated reports on players finding the electric zombie too tough due to it being too quick compared to the player. The player had the mage dash to compete with the speed of the electric zombie, however, there were reports saying that the mage dash was too taxing on the mana compared to the distance that the player could achieve. This data was used from the 2 open-ended questions: “Were there any problems with the game that you faced?” and “What would you recommend to expand on for the game?”. The response shown below is my favorite on what I have to work on after the study on the prototype:

Analyzing all the feedback, I also found that there were no reports on bugs within the game which made me very happy to know.

Extra Things I Have Learnt Or Problems I Have Solved This Week

Response to the report

I responded to the feedback that I got from my report, I decided to make a small balance change with the mage dash. The complaints were that it was too expensive as well as propelling too short a distance. I decided to change this. The code below will show a before and after image of the code:

So, I decided to buff the mage dash. I decreased the cost of it by 5. I also made the speed increased by increasing the “dashMultiplier” variable. The mage dash will also last longer as the “dashMinuser” was reduced in value. The code for how these variables are used will be referenced below:

Plans For Next Week

Over the coming weeks, I will try to implement a hybrid spell system as well as trying to respond to more advice that the participants gave in the report.