Designer Blog 5

Hello and welcome back to Gobby’s Farm! I am the lead designer, Kaeli Becvar, and I’m here to give information on how play testing went for what is our Alpha Build! If you haven’t had the pleasure of downloading and playing it, I highly recommend it. For this build, everything is pretty polished on game loop mechanics, general feel for the maps and layouts, and how we’d want to fully finish the game with how much time we have left in the semester. I am fully confident that this game will be ready to be bug fixed at the end of Sprint 6 and I am proud of my team and how much they’ve been working to help make this vision possible. Without a further ado, let’s look at the feedback for our Alpha!!

For this playtest period, we had some small issues that arose on specific computers. During our building for levels, no one noticed that the tree was actually 3 tree’s stacked into one group, meaning there were about 6000 poly’s scattered throughout the three area’s we had available, making some computers with not up to date graphics cards lag severely. Because of this small issue, I quickly fixed it then let our level designers know that everything was fixed and they could redo the tree’s with LOD’s in mind! Due to this, I know of two testers whose computers were unable to play the game but with the fix, this should be easily avoidable now!

With this sprint, our analytics show that we had 17 downloads on our Itch.io page and I had about 8 in person play testers either from a school event and work event, all correlating to 12 feedback! Overall, not bad at all, though the more feedback would’ve been very helpful. What we did receive came with some new bugs, overall compliments and complaints on certain parts, and mostly positive feedback on how the world feels.

Overall, people are having fun with the game! There’s been compliments on the game loop and how it felt to be a small guy running through the world! Only parts that were unpleasant were the placements of turrets, being unable to dodge things accurately, and cleaning the movements of Gobby. We’re hoping with the implementation of Gobby’s actual arms, it will improve movement tremendously and not make it sway too hard. But it’s good to hear that people are having fun with the game and watching some of their interactions with the traps had some of us laughing a lot. 

People have been enjoying the land for the Wizards garden but also showed concern when they’d see the next area and be hesitant on how large the map truly is for the time they have. One way to counter this is by adding more areas for the player to sneak back into area one to drop off their crops and run back out, in which this was immediately changed with our level designer where we started discussing where to place certain new entrances to make sure player’s don’t feel too pressured with how little time they have. We want some stress, but not the kind that makes player’s to not play the game.

Another issue that arose is that player’s were unaware they could throw produce into the hole where the player spawned or to disable traps and turrets. This is a huge oversight by me and made me realise that there really needs to be an explanation on how the game works and what throwing can do for the player. But that’s okay, I plan on quickly drawing a little tutorial to play right after the intro is played so no one is confused on how to complete the goal of the game. We want our audience to know that they’re able to see that they have choices to avoid certain traps in exchange for losing a few points.

For this game, my idea was having a regular story ending that plays after meeting every quota, but also to give the option of awarding the player with their exploration by finding hidden items in each area. Most of the play testers found the first one and overall agreed that if they had the choice to run through the world to find each one for a new ending, they would! Though it's half and half on strongly agree and agree, the fact that they would give me enough motivation to finalize drawing the story and having it ready to show for the beta.

Traps definitely got players, and left some frustrated on how quick the turret was to shoot Gobby down. Though they are working as intended, there was an interesting bug that would happen with the eye sentry where if Gobby threw enough produce at it, it could get stuck due to collision and trap it from roaming around or following Gobby to do its attack. That may be a fix for Sprint 7 but it's an interesting one nonetheless. 

With bugs, there is a sizable amount that I hope my team will be able to polish before the game is fully due. The state of the game is very close to complete, which leaves me comfortable with where we’re sitting in scope of finishing the game. But things can change, and with it I will follow to make sure Gobby is a fun and approachable game for this Beta Build. 

For Gobby, thank you for reading!