Dev Blog #3 - Shapeshift Dungeon

Hello, Sky here for Dev Blog #3! During this last sprint there was lots of good progress made furthering the game towards completion. As a team we completed the same number of points worth of tasks as Sprint 2 which means that we have hit a consistent stride, and can make better determinations about what we can and can not get done with the time ahead of us. As of now, we are a bit behind on implementing the enemies into the game. I had originally designed 10 unique enemy types in the game's Game Design Doc. I quickly realized that this was out of the scope of the project, and cut 2 enemies from production early. Now that we are entering into Sprint 4, we only have 2 of the 8 enemies modeled, and only 1 of them animated. This is mostly due to the fact that we've been focused on modeling and animating the player, but the extra time it's taken to do that means we'll most likely need to cut another enemy type or two before the end here. The good news is that play-testers like the game so far, and we are getting some great feedback about it!

Engagement with the game is extremely high, which is amazing. With 19 ratings not a single person rated their engagement as a 1 or a 2! However, our level feedback emails indicate that many players quit playing the game after their first death, which means that despite player enjoying the game, the re-playability is low. This will hopefully improve over time as we add more new items and enemies to the game.

Another strong data point is that many players felt the game was difficult, but not too difficult, which is exactly where I'd like it to be. No one said the game was super easy which is great. It's meant to be targeted towards a more hardcore audience, so the game needs to be challenging in order to better appeal to that audience.

For our in-game level feedback form not a lot was changed from last sprint, but the changes we did make were important nonetheless.

The first major change is the addition of more variables to track when players submit feedback. We can now see the player's collected items, the number of stat upgrades they have picked up, and the current run time of the game. Having more data is great, however it is becoming quite cumbersome to organize the 100+ emails into any meaningful graphs or charts. There's simply too much to manually input each time around. Therefore, we will be attempting to switch over to using Unity Analytics to start tracking most of this data, and then condensing the feedback emails to just the written feedback about the maps.

We also changed the level feedback pop-up to appear once players have interacted with the center tile instead of when the last enemy is killed, so that they are always in a safe place when the form pops up and they are given ample time to explore the level first. Additionally, the "Did you like this level layout?" question was changed from a Yes/No colored slider, to an uncolored slider with a frowny and happy face. This was done to address an issue where a small number of players were rating the level low but stating that they liked it in their description.

Another really important design aspect that we needed to start considering was the implementation of the items in the game, and how they were received by players. The health potions, stat upgrade potions, and a handful of equipment items were added as optional pickups in the game. Here's the data we were able to gather on the items so far:

The most noteworthy thing here is that players did not find the Speed Upgrade from the Stat Upgrade Potion to be an exciting upgrade option. It was rated less than half as often as the health and attack upgrades, which means it will need some alterations/buffs to make it more appealing for players. Additionally, the equipment items appear randomly in any order, and thus it would be expected to see a mostly even spread of players picking them up. However, the bowling ball was the most commonly picked up item by far, while the Lead Suit and Rocket Boots were evidently less appealing options. Players even wrote in feedback to state that the Lead Suit and Rocket Boots did not feel very good because they were making the base movement of the player harder to use. So we'll be adjusting that for sure moving forward. There were also a couple players who didn't take any equipment items, and instead only took Stat Potion Upgrades. This is also a good sign that the equipment items are not as powerful or exciting as they should be.

As for Health Potions, most players said that they got enough to keep going, which is the response that I am aiming for, while many other players said that they needed more potions desperately. Based on the level feedback emails, I know that some players did not take the 2 starting potions in the first room of the game. As such, it would make sense that these players didn't have enough potions. One player even stated they wanted an option to heal... so clearly the fact that they could pick up the 2 potions on the starting floor was not clear. To address this problem, I will be making it a requirement to take the starting potion before the player is allowed to progress to the next level.

All in all, we got a lot of good new feedback from players which I've compiled into the Player Feedback excel sheet and will be using to make adjustments moving forward. Many players asked for better mouse and keyboard controls, so we'll aim to deliver on that. The player controller was massively improved but still needs some adjustments before it's where we need it to be.

I'm really looking forward to implementing as many of these changes as we can before the next build, thanks as always for reading!

- Shapeshift Dungeon Team