Feedback Friday #79 - September 13-16, 2019

G'day folks!

Want design feedback for your new game? Then you've found the right thread! Feedback Friday runs from Friday to Monday every week.

What To Show

• Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play > everything else
• How To Scope Small (Unity tutorial)
• Post a link to a playable game, preferably WebGL. If you don't have a playable game, post something substantial, not just text.

How To Ask For Feedback

• Be concise.
• Specify what you want feedback on and what you don't.
• Resist the urge to write an immediate defense to feedback. Take the time to understand their points. Remember that your friends here are taking time out of their busy schedules to help you for free.

How To Give Feedback

• Be positive. Every game has some redeeming quality.
• Focus on the design, not the designer.
• Be specific and constructive. Don't like something? Explain why.

Let the feedback begin!

 

Nothing yet? If you've got something, big or small, and you think getting feedback might be cool, let's get the fun started!

 

Maybe once a week is causing us to run out of people who want feedback!

 

Yeah I'd guess it usually takes a long time to get to this point, unless really sticking to whiteboxing. Maybe the host should cook something up each week for discussion? Even something very small. That'd be once a month for each person.

 

I'll put something up for feedback:

<< CLICK HERE TO PLAY >>



It's an updated version of my one-mechanic idea. The premise is that you're after the big bad boss, but you need to bring her three lieutenants to justice first.

Your only action is to assign crew members to events on the way to each target (the lieutenants and then the Pirate Queen). Events keep crew members tied up for a number of turns, making them unavailable to handle other events in the meantime. Well, I guess the other action is choosing which of two paths to take to progress to the next turn.


Feedback I'm Not Interested In:

• Fine points of the UI. The event UI is definitely placeholder. The "cards" for the crew members need work. I don't care to get into those weeds yet.
• The writing of the crew members and events.
• The difficulty balance of the events.
• The "win" state. It's not very exciting right now.

Things To Ignore:

• I do want to limit the number of crew you can have, maybe 6 max. I haven't implemented that yet.

Feedback I'm Looking For:

• Is the concept fun?
• Is the play deep enough for a few minutes of casual play?
• Feedback on the big picture of the UI -- the idea that there's a section that lists your crew and a section that shows the timeline of active and future events.

 

@Teila - If Aynsley has another version of her game (from Feedback Friday #75) ready for feedback, that one had a lot of promise. I'd love to playtest a version with more content.

 

Hi Tony, She has done some work on it but we have a big contract for art and she is taking exams for college entrance. She says she will see what she can get done by Friday.

Thanks for checking in! She is looking forward to showing more off.

 

@TonyLi She says to tell you that it is game pad supported and tested now!

 

I might have something in a month or so.... maybe. Lots of stuff to learn but I think I got most my workflow vindicated and should be able to actually make stuff now.

I gonna be a bit late but I play @TonyLi's link a bit later or tomorrow.

 

actually I gave it a quick play. I like the concept, I got addicted pretty fast. Cool art too, even if that's placeholder.

The language of "choose course" was a little confusing to me. Only after going through like 15 turns did I start ot realize what was going on. Is there a way to wait out turns? Or its always binary choice between two avenues and you must continually choose one or the other?

It is interesting and has a kind of gambling game addictive pull to it, and I can see the strategy getting a lot deeper. I could see getting pretty invested in teh characters and their stories as well, even if it is just cards. If they are leveling up, gaining new skills, that can be strong pull to get invested with certain characters and see how far you can take them.

 

It's always a binary choice. Most of them will be bad -- dangers that need one or more crew to handle. It wouldn't do if you could just bypass all of them.

 

yeah makes sense. maybe you can collect some special "get out of jail" cards to save for a rainy day?

 

I had a play just now. Overall I think the concept is cool, and the character/story angle works well for a more casual game with less 'stuff to do'. As usual I went looking for problems and magnifying issues to clarify them, here are my thoughts .. bear in mind as I've probably mentioned before, I don't play turn-based games really, and so maybe things that I find jarring are things other people think are fine.

There's definitely a dissonance for me in terms of switching attention between different missions. I'll put crew members on one mission and then I sort of consider it 'done' and switch my attention to the next one. Then I get some result from the first one, but it comes straight after I spent time focused on the second one. So mentally it feels like a bit of a switch to put things in the correct order. Possible solutions might be:

- Screen partitioning of each mission and result to keep them more clearly separated.
- Some immediate feedback in the result to put my focus on the mission it is related to.
- A stronger visual cue for 'tracking' an ongoing mission so I can keep part of my attention on it.

On the whole I think it may be an issue that the current setup encourages looking toward the 'next' mission and so it's very easy to become disinterested in previous missions and not care so much about the outcome. Thats another reason why I think ongoing missions should have more visual attention priority than they do.

On the same note, looking at it from a different angle, I think it would be helpful to have a better visual layout for the current distribution of your resources at any given time. This ties past, present and future missions together in relevance, because they are all part of your resource 'picture'. Rather than focusing on each mission individually, the game becomes a question of balancing resources against problems and reducing the overall 'error', even though that picture consists of missions are at different positions in time.

What may be helpful for nailing the visual aspect is to really isolate the problem by creating a prototype that is completely abstract. For example, you have red, green and blue circles (crew) that you can add to red, green and blue squares (missions). Then experiment with creating a layout that gives you the best information as to how your resources are distributed. It's probably going to be a good foundation for displaying more complex resource distribution.

Anyway, I hope this makes sense, maybe it's just me but I do think that the layout is the key to making this game as fun as can be. I think this idea can be really cool for a very casual game for people looking for something with a little bit of story and character and not just mechanics.

 

Good idea. Currently if you don't assign a crew member to an event, it immediately fails. Typically this kills a random crew member since there isn't one assigned to the event to kill. If you don't have any crew available, it takes a hit point off the ship. (The ship in the upper left starts with 5 hit points.) Instead, if you don't assign a crew member to an event, it could just immediately remove the hit point. This way you can choose to take damage to your ship instead of risking a crew member -- so kind of like a "get out of jail" card, at least for your crew.

Thanks for those suggestions! I'll play around with the presentation as time allows. (This is an extremely side project, which is kind of nice because I can idly ponder it while waiting in line at the grocery store, etc.) There won't be any more complexity to it -- e.g., no additional resource management. I'll look for a better way to show how long each event has left and who's tied up with it. Maybe if each crew member's full-size card is overlaid on top of the event it will make it clear that the crew member is no longer on the ship and is tied up with an event.

 

Wouldn't it be possible to just have one continuous feedback thread? I often see this thread when it's too late, though I'm sure people would appreciate feedback even if it is a week later.

 

Thats a good point. Tbh, I think having it over the weekend is too short and perhaps people tend to take time off then too. Even if you get feedback, chances are you won't be able to act on it in a big way before that feedback friday is over.

On the other hand, one big long thread with 100 different discussions mixed in over months of time is going to be a huge mess.

The previous feedback friday had 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off I believe. I'm thinking 1 week on/1 week off, or 1 week on/2 weeks off might be good. I certainly have no problem dropping in every day of the week to put in some feedback if stuff is happening.

 

Problem with doing it continuously is not only a huge thread

There are Friday Feedback days every week, four of them. If you get Feedback on Friday or the weekend, you can always come back the next week to another Friday Feedback. Keeping it open all the time is not a good idea as the feedback gets lost and the thread gets huge.

Besides..there is continuous Feedback ALWAYS on the Unity forums. You can create your own thread about your game and ask for Feedback every day. That way each developer can get continuous feedback for their own game in their own thread.

Friday Feedback is for quick, short, show it to me, help me with it and then I go on my way to fix it. It is not suppose to provide continuous support.

That is what makes it so great. Drop in, give feedback, get feedback....

 

Deadlines (like getting something ready for the next Feedback Friday) give us the tiny nudge we sometimes need to finish up the next feature. If it weren't for the last Feedback Friday deadline, I would never have posted the playable build above and gotten important feedback from Billy4184 and BIGTIMEMASTER.

 

Absolutely, very good point, Tony!

 

Yes, this was my experience as well.

 

What people can do is one thing, what structure will make them get busy on this thread is another.

There's advantages in having a deadline for sure, and we don't want to just cut the tension completely. It's probably just a question of momentum and building up that regularity so people are sort of planning ahead and hitting it on that first day.

I think we're doing ok so far. I do think it's a good idea for the host to put in a prototype to get things started, and it's great @TonyLi that you put in an update on yours in this thread. I'll be keeping a few small prototypes to drop in too.

 

Not of us have a prototype that needs feedback.

 

That's ok, it's not a necessity, just an idea for how to make sure that the feedback friday hits the ground running each week.

 

Okay, it was just a suggestion, I see now that this way is better. I will try to regularly check into this forum over the weekends and can hopefully provide some feedback.

 

Yeah, it is nice but some of us make large games that take a lot time and will not be ready for feedback for a while. lol

I do have Aynsley though and she will probably be asking for feedback for a months. She already has a second game in mind.