Feedback Friday #89 - November 22-25, 2019

Feedback Friday is now open!

Want design feedback for your work in progress and need some playtesting feedback?

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. 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 redeeming qualities.
• Focus on the design, not the designer.

Feedback Friday #88 is here.

 

Hey guys, I'd really appreciate any feedback on my first game :

https://jpk1234.itch.io/game1

It's a fps platformer based around using a grappling hook to swing around. It's a PC game, 64-bit version.

 

@pk1234dva anything specific you're looking for feedback on?

I gave a quick play. Here's first impressions:

If press mouse 1, fire another rope. Don't require canceling the previous.

Need feedback on momentum (screen effects to communicate speed and acceleration, wind noises, etc)

Need feedback to communicate when we are reset. Some placeholder stingers could do for now. With such limited art it is hard to maintain 3d spatial orientation.

I am not sold that first person is the right perspective for this. Maybe it is largely do to flat shading and lack of environment, but its hard to maintain orientation and have intuitive understanding of where I am in 3d space. At minimum I think we need a lot more feedback and wider FOV.

The core idea is great and when I can manage to get a string of good swings in, it's fun as hell.

You'll need to really break player in slowly though and ramp up difficulty smoothly. The basic gameplay is fun enough, with some upgrades and skills to progress I think that's enough to get some hours of relaxing fun out of. A great casual/relaxation game.

Still needs a clear theme and style though. Let us be tarzan or a super hero or something. I think with the cool music you got now maybe we can be a weird alien on a gas planet with floating rock chunks and this is how it travels around. I dunno just some kind of theme so I can let imagination put me somewhere interesting.

 

Is the difficulty ok? Is it "fun"? The visuals are clearly poor, but is the style something enjoyable/interesting to look at (icy/weird, somewhat alien surreal). Is the movement and game visually smooth? Would you be interested in playing a game like this, with more features (was thinking of something like rocket jumps to allow for more complicated platforming)?

Or would it be more interesting if various platforming like this were more like an aspect of some classical game? Like some FPS shooter, where interesting movement could be needed for survival in harder levels etc, or where it would provide an advantage.

Mostly just interested whether the swinging around is something that seems like good fun, and whether the various harder possibilities of swings (around corners etc.) is something interesting enough to pursue further as a primary focus of some other game.

I would be willing to make a game that's based around primarily this - maybe other maps, time-trial-based, where you pick up stuff etc, with some other tricks possible (rocket jumps like I mentioned), power-ups. But maybe it's better if I just pursue a game that mostly contains this feature, and isn't based on it.

 

Yeah it is fun. I was excited to try it out and I honestly want to play a lot more of it. But it's not ready yet because it doesn't have enough feedback mechanisms to make it not frustrating to get the hang of. It's a gameplay that is all about feel but I don't have enough feedback to "feel" myself moving in the game world yet.

I would definitely recommend continuing to work on it. Small things will go a long way in grounding player in the game world, and once you do, I think it's just good simple fun.

I think adding in more complexity would ruin it. No shooting. Probably the most complex things I'd prefer is just additions to your movement. Boosters like you said, maybe a hang glider. You want to keep it simple enough that it's not stressful trying to hit the correct key. Keep minimum of buttons like you got so it's relaxing to play and only requires correct timing -- not cycling through a thousand tools. Maybe allow player to select one powerup tool for each stage. Or place powerups as floating things you got to take risk to get and then you have them for limited time.

You'd definitely want lots of varied themes. Personally I am not a fan of the faceted low poly look. Though I can't think of something necessarily more fitting.

 

Thanks a ton, I'll definitely be considering all you said when working on it, and I'm glad you enjoyed at least parts of it (when things go well etc.).

The low-poly look really is just a necessity for me - I've never designed anything before and only learned blender very quickly on the go. I can see myself spending a year before I get proficient at it, because art stuff like this is just very far from anything I've ever done. For my first game, I thought it's a good idea to get a good idea of how everything works, even though I ideally don't plan on doing everything alone.

I'll probably try and find someone who would like to work with me on whatever I'll be doing next.

Again, thanks a ton for the feedback!

 

Great advice!! Thanks for helping out, @BIGTIMEMASTER

 

I pretty much agree with BIGTIMEMASTER. Especially where he says:

I felt the same way. I even lost track of which direction I was supposed to be going half way through. The biggest problem was trying to land on a platform but I couldn't see it or figure out where it was in time.

As far as the game providing feedback to the player, Another thing I think could use better feedback is when the grappling line attaches to something. Right now it doesn't really look like it's connecting, it just looks like it may just be floating there in the air.

Also, I'd love to try this in VR but I'm not sure if it would work or be terrible.

 

@kdgalla Thanks for the feedback!

 

Earlier this month we went to an unusual convention not far from our home. The convention focused on playtesting and was mostly for rpgs, card games, and tabletop games. However, two of us had video games at the convention. We had four two hour sessions over a two day period and a total of 30 playtesters. At times we even had a line waiting since we had only four computers available.

We had participants fill out a form answering questions about aspects of the game and their general feel while playing the game. Feedback was mostly positive and we enjoyed watching their faces and body language as they played. It gave us as much feedback or more than the written remarks.

Team members made spreadsheets with problems and suggestion that were given verbally or written down and worked to improve the game. They also learned what people liked best so they could enhance those areas of the game.

Overall, it was a fabulous experience. We met new people and a musician liked the game so much he offered to provide music. If you can find something similar where you live, go check it out, whether you want to expose your game to testers or if you want to playtest other people's games.

Those of you who have participated in FF now and in the past have no idea how valuable your feedback has been to the game developers who were brave enough to show their stuff.

Thank you!!

 

Thanks. I'm not that sold on the first person view either, it's just something that's natural to me because... well I've been playing mostly first person games my whole life.

I'd consider trying it in VR, but I don't have VR myself, so maybe in the future. I do wonder how constant "falling" down would feel, could make people feel extra sick or be pretty cool.

 

@pk1234dva I would like to see actually shooting arrow / harpoon, which is affected by gravity, dragging a rope behind.

Have you played worms1/2/Armageddon etc??
There was rope ability, to jump between rocks etc.

The ceiling would really nee be higher in my opinion, to allow time for target new shot.

 

Yup, the ninja rope in worms. I definitely enjoyed that. I definitely considered treating it as a projectile, but the game is a prototype for bigger plans in the future and I didn't want to make it more complicated than it is. Visually, I think that I should definitely add some sort of feedback for how "tight" the rope is/whether the slack is pulled out, whether I do it visually (rope could get more pale when the slack is not pulled out), or geometrically (rope hangs when slack is not pulled out). Right now it's always a straight line of the same color, which really doesn't tell you anything.

Instead of those sort of things though, I've focused on trying to make the mechanic as robust as possible, so that it works well in pretty much all situations, even without any special treatment and preparations. It's somewhat difficult to actually make it reliable imo, so that took the most effort. Initially I even considered allowing the points where the rope bends to be movable, but that proved to be pretty much impossible to do reliably, unless you write down/keep track of the faces of all the meshes around which the rope can bend. So the rope is sort of "sticky" around the corners when it bends.

 

You can use raycast, to detect, where rope should bend along other mesh surface /edge. Then add point there, for line renderer.

 

Yes, that's the first thing, check if there's something in the way, and if there is, create a new point from which the rope starts. But then there's the issue of when to remove the newly created point of contact/new hang point - again the first thing that comes to mind is to check by raycast - if there's nothing in the way you remove the newly created hang point.

But that won't work in certain situations, like when the rope is long and you bend around some sort of long vertical thing with a sharp angle (like a very tall, thin cuboid) - the rope will "skip" the object as you spin around, because there's nothing between you and the first hang point. So you have to do more than that.

I do this by storing a signed angle of how far around the contact point you've turned - I measure the angle between (player.position - hangpoint[recent]) and (hangpoint[recent] - hangpoint[recent-1]) (here hangpoint[recent] is the most recent hang point, hangpoint[recent-1] is the one before that). But then there's another issue - with respect to what axis do you measure the angle? You need to define some sort of orientation with respect to which you measure the angle.

So again, there's the issue of how do you define this orientation. With a vertical object it would make most sense for it to be just vertical. But that's because you know the object is a long thin vertical object and you know that you'll probably be spinning around it a pretty much horizontal fashion. If you don't know what the object is and how it will be used, that won't necessarily work, so you have to find a reliable way to assign the orientation based on the object and perhaps based on how the player is moving.

Lastly there's the issue of determining where exactly the new hang point should be. When you raycast and there's something in the way, if you're moving fast, then if you just create the object wherever they raycast hit something, the rope could end up going "through" the object . So ideally you should do some sort of better approximation of where the new hang point should be created. That's pretty simple if you just try a few more raycasts starting from somewhere between the position of player in the previous frame and the current frame. You can do a binary search algorithm for this and get a pretty decent approximation with just say ~4 additional raycasts, unless you're moving really fast.

Most of these things are details, but if you want the mechanic to be reliable, it might take a bit of effort.

 

I discussed rope problem while ago, but can not find the thread unfortunately.
Regarding a rope, hope that helps.


Normally I don't find Unity Answer that useful, but this is good explanation, using raycast.
https://answers.unity.com/questions/1467868/2d-wrapping-a-line-around-a-collision-object.html

 

Yeah, my grappling hook is essentially the same. Pretty cool that I ended up doing the same thing as the author, despite never seeing his post or the one he links to.

One difference is calculating the angle for the unwrapping. In 2D, the orientation is pretty much chosen - it's gonna be the normal to the playing field (+- z in unity). So you can pretty much always just take a cross product, or determine the axis based on the players movement. In 3D, you have to figure it out somehow yourself a bit more and play around with it, like I mentioned.

Lastly, when it comes to faster movement, approximation of the point might be necessary for good results. In 2D games with consistently high framerate and relatively slow movement, you don't have to worry about the raycast skipping over objects between frames, but in a 3D game with somewhat faster movement some approximation might be a good idea.