Game Updates

The testing for the game focused on the Visual aesthetic, interface usability, the controls, the goals of the game and any bugs that might be prevalent. 

Visual Aesthetics

I wanted to get a feel for what people thought of the visuals of the game. Overall, the game rated favourably for its visual appeal. 66% of players rated it highly as either a 4/5 or 5/5. I was quite pleased with that. Most of the visuals were my own work with the exception of the game level background and the lava. Someone did rate the visuals 1/5. There were no comments left to improve but I did find the background I originally had might not have provided the best contrast. So I sourced a background from the web and I feel this offers falls more in line with my original vision.  Before and After below.

Before

After

Interface Usability

This question was focused on how easy or difficult it was to navigate through the UI elements of the game. The feedback from the play test ranged from a 3/5 (average) to 5/5 (perfect). There wasn't any additional feedback provided around this aspect. During the play test, I still hadn't quite managed to get my high score saver code working. This may have impacted peoples perception of the UI.

The Goals of the Game

I really wanted to understand if players knew what they needed to do and how to go about doing it. I didn't get time to create a tutorial level so I added a scene that explains the rules of the game. 66% of respondents said they understood what was required, while the remaining 34% were a blend of being unsure or that they didn't understand. After the session, I moved the "How to Play button to the top of the list to bring more visual attention to this before the person starts a new game.

Game Controls

The game has some fairly basic game controls (left and right and space to jump). I had wanted to implement basic controls as this would help with my target age range. 83% of respondents rated the control set up as 3/3 (perfect). Out of the feedback provided, I don't see any need to alter the game control set up.  However, there was feedback on the implementation of the controls which leads me to bugs.

Bugs

Going into the testing I knew this would be one of the bigger pain points of the game and 83% of players noticed this as well. On the original game object for the player, I had a child game object attached to the player. The placement of this meant that the jump mechanism would only trigger if the player was standing (or rolled) vertically. I have updated the player game object which has fixed this issue.   I changed the script to no longer check if the player is grounded based on a seperate grounding collider. Instead, the code does a ground check on the collider attached to the primary game object. This means that even on a different angle, the jump mechanism will still work. 

Other changes.

There were plans to include the option to record the players time if they beat the current best. However, I was having difficulty getting the playerprefs script within the EndGameListener script. The issue was that the High Score screen would appear no matter that time, even if it wasn't the best. The second issue was that the time of the player would not show on this screen. Another, time would appear. The third issue I ran into was that after the player does enter their name, the scene would switch to show the high scores, however only the (correct) time would show and not the name. I ran out of time to get this fixed for submission, so the player will now just see the Game Over scene.