Some Thoughts From Black Rock!

What I Liked Most

It seems that you now have a game framework where you are in a good position to tweak the gameplay parameters reasonably easily. You've already managed to iterate on your ideas in several areas which is great. For example you've introduced a minimap, added the idea of heat, and changed the effect of the shield.

I thought that your interim report was pretty accurate and honest about what bits of the game aren't working right now and how you might fix them. For example you consider issues with the camera not always showing the important parts of the arena.

Generally the movement of the ball and camera in the world feels OK.

And there's music!

What I Liked Least

I was immediately confused by the title screen. It's an unusual decision to expect the user to press X rather than A to select on an XBox pad!

It felt to me that the game world was too big. In your current game setup it seems that both players have an interest in being quite close to one another, so I wonder if smaller worlds would work better. Also the world design could do with being more distintive. Maybe it's because the pyramid was missing in my version, but I kept getting lost. (On this point is the minimap flipped? There's something strange about trying to use it to navigate...)

Having negative scores is a bit mathematical! (And trickier to read in the split-second that your mind devotes to it when playing). Could you reconsider the scoring system so this doesn't happen?

Ideas For Improvement

I'd like to see better feedback to the player about who's winning and how long there is left to play. (There's a bug that meant that the timer didn't always appear on the screen in the version I played). A change in music for the last 10 seconds might be fun if the scores are close.

I think it would be worth experimenting with smaller worlds. The world is the third character in your game and should contribute to the gameplay. Right now the world layout feels a little random and doesn't feel like it's been tuned to be fun. It would be worth trying out different world designs to see if they are fun. Maybe adding pickup/powerup points in the world might focus the way the players use the world.

Cues for what the direction the player is facing would help with navigation. There are lots of options here: lighting, skydome detail, recognisable scenery etc.

Page URL: https://twiki.graphics.ethz.ch/bin/view/GameClass/BlockRockInterimReportFeedbackTeam7
2024-03-29
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