Until this first version I was the only tester (and my girlfriend a little).
I asked my brother and my girl friend to test it. Of course some things go has planned and others don’t:
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What went wrong:
Tutorial:
– It was not clear on how to go from one step of the tutorial to the next one.
I put a red cross button near the tutorial message. I was hoping player would just close the message with this red cross, as it would have triggered the next step.
However neither my brother nor my girlfriend saw this red cross button. I think our brain are so used to a button too close to a window, and we just don’t process it.
I want the tutorial message to look nice and in the end it was not functional. So now I put a blinking button that says “NEXT” 🙂
– The tutorial doesn’t explain enough. I just explain how to get resources and how to build a structure.
I don’t like long tutorial, and that’s why I made it as short as possible and explained as little as possible.
I didn’t explain the “attack phase”. I was hoping that people just guessed that they need to build towers to protect their base.
Actually I was not that wrong because they guessed it like I predicted. But they found the solution a little too late and they both got their base destroyed…
I already redid the tutorial to include the attack phase. I hope it won’t be too long.
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What wen’t right:
Dynamic difficulty:
– It worked pretty well. I still have to manage to set a difficulty progression factor, but the system adapts itself pretty well to each player.
They both lost one time ( my brother and my girl friend), but they didn’t feel frustrated. So it’s not too difficult.
And even if the player knows that the difficulty is adjustable, it’s not in his best interest to lower his performance.
A good player will win more money at the end of each level, and will unlock things faster.
I will tell you more on the dynamic difficulty system in another news update.
– People don’t stop playing! Well at least they stop playing when there aren’t new things to discover, or when they hit a level where I didn’t set the difficulty factor correctly.
They are enjoying around 2 hours of gameplay!
Now I’ve sent the build to 4 other people.
I’m waiting for their feedback….
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