Designer Blog 6 - The Warfront From Intercepts

Hoi Everyone,

Sprint 6 has finished and we are close to release (yep still terrifying). As always, we got a lot of good stuff done like having the game loop, updating features, and all of our models done for the battle sims. As always, if you want to know more about what our team has been up to, check out Natalie Hoffmann’s Producer Blog. 

This sprint started with another playtest for me. With the playtest, I wanted to test the tutorial’s effectiveness and the game balance. The reason for testing the tutorial is kinda obvious from the last blog: our game is complicated and needs to be explained. Game balance wasn’t something I could effectively test before since there were missing features like a tutorial (it’s just not a good idea to test for balance if the player doesn’t know how to play). I only ended up having 7 playtesters again, but was still able to get a lot of good information from them.

The tutorials did help players understand how to play but still need work. One major issue with the tutorial was the fact that the tutorial didn’t pause the timer when explaining the mechanics. This leads to the player only having around 5 minutes to play the game after reading all of the tutorials. I found that playtesters either got bored at that point and wanted to stop playing there or wanted to try the prototype again now that they could skip the tutorial. So that does show that the game is fun, but the tutorial needs some tweaks and could be made better.

However, just because the playtesters wanted to play it again, there were some issues with the game balance. A good amount of players who did want to try again still felt the game was on the frustrating side. There were a few reasons for this. The biggest one for players was the fact that a fake message was spawned for each of the real messages. Oftentimes, this led to players being only able to sort all the messages before time ran out or sort some messages and deploy units some of the units while guessing on the rest. On paper, this is the dilemma I wanted the players to face: go fast and risk misinformation, or go slow and risk running out of time. However, playtesters found it frustrating due to the amount of messages being spawned. The solution I came up with was to have the game spawn fewer fake messages at the start of the game and as the player captures more territory, that increases along with other features like how many messages get encrypted. I will also need to look into other ways to balance the game like the amount of time the player has. Overall, the difficulty is overwhelming but has a lot of potential.

There were a few smaller things I noticed in the playtest that I noted. Our game needs more UX feedback since players often misclicked on things (especially for deployment) that confused them. We are hoping that tooltips will help with that. There were more to the tutorial that could be improved like having a back button and a button to be able to bring back up the tutorial. Players wanted to focus on messages not in their hands to read them better. I also found that many people weren’t able to solve the riddles I made for the chemical table. And, of course, bugs were found (though nothing game-breaking, so that was good). Overall we are heading in a good direction based on the feedback we received.

The biggest thing I wanted to tackle after the playtest was improving the tutorial. The tutorial not pausing time was the biggest problem from the playtest, but fortunately, it was a simple fix. I then added features that would make the tutorial easier to use: being able to go back, being able to skip the tutorial, and being able to rewatch the tutorial. Going back and skipping the tutorial was simple (except for a moment when I forgot how queues worked). Being able to go back in the tutorial made sure the player didn’t have to make sure they read everything correctly the first time and skipping would allow the player to skip the tutorial if they already know how to play. Replaying the tutorial was a little trickier since I needed to make sure the right tutorial was being replayed at the right location and the player didn’t bring up a tutorial when they shouldn’t. I also made it so the timer would only stop the first time the player sees the tutorial so that the player couldn’t just wait in the tutorial for more time. The last thing I wanted to improve for the tutorial was highlighting things when the tutorial mentioned something. This was a lot harder than I expected. I found a lot of ways that either looked bad, would take too much time to implement, or worked in the Unity editor, but not in the build (thanks Unity). I eventually found a method that was simple to implement and looked good. The quality of life improvements to the tutorial will hopefully help the player understand the game better if they need it.

The next thing I tackled was making new and changing chemical riddles since the ones I made were a bit too hard for my liking. A lot of players just couldn’t figure out the riddles. Some just needed to be changed since there were too many interpretations of the riddle. However, players especially had difficulty on riddles where I spelled out the chemical names with the first letter of each sentence. I had a lot of playtesters like this riddle, but too many players didn’t solve it before I pointed it out. However, my friend saw the problem and helped me come up with a solution. The problem is that the player isn’t focused on capitalization especially if they don’t know to look for it. The solution he gave was to have similar but different riddles that are more obvious so the player knows to look for them. For example, have the chemical name capitalized in the middle of the sentence instead of the beginning or have the letters of the chemical name missing from the words. These will stick out to the player more since something is very wrong with the writing. Hopefully, this will make the player look at these riddles from many angles. 

Finally, there were tasks that I took on that took less time. I did start balancing the game’s time and message generation before the chemical riddles but I realized I was blocked when I realized I wasn’t the one programming it. I needed to wait for the programmers to finish those tools before using them. I also went to all the artists to get their opinions of how the rooms looked after the level designer decorated them and see what could be added to make them look better. This included more props and ideas of where to move things to make the rooms less barren. Overall, I got 

Overall, I feel like we are in a good spot to release the game at the end of the last sprint. I will be experimenting a lot to try and balance the game to be more enjoyable. We are just finishing up with our last few features and assets to make a good game. Now that we are close to the end, I wish I had another semester to try and pitch and add more to the game, but I have to graduate and enter the real world someday. Here’s to ending strong

Until Next Time,
Justin Lam
Game Designer