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Another week's gone by and there's been another series of design refinements from us to report. Some of these gifs are from old game builds but they help to illustrate what we've been wrestling with.
Much like the subject of the previous post, play-tests have been such a crucial component in getting this update right. Aside from fixing the placement of assets in our level block-outs, issues with spacial awareness and line of sight, it has also helped us to understand the various play patterns present in the game.
An interesting thing to report on is the length of this update. Initially we thought it would take about 30 minutes to complete, however what we found is that players new to Glitchspace were taking on average over 2 hours to finish it. Users that know what they're doing (either excellent problem solvers or those with experience in programming) take around 1hr 20mins to finish it. So it's quite a meaty update for our users :3. This will very likely mean that the finished release of Glitchspace's story mode will clock in at more than our 2-3 hour aim we had last year.
However, one of the biggest cruxes we've been wrestling with is in trying to fix this behaviour, especially with new players:
Whilst we've been doing some hardcore iteration over the past several weeks, Like a whack-a-mole it keeps popping up at every play-testing session we have done with 2.0 and it's proving to be very difficult to fix. In fact it's been a problem with the game since day one (that's over two years ago!) and we have to get it resolved before we go any further
When speaking with players about why they were doing it, what we realised is that the problem was actually the way connectors were being presented. Whilst players were usually associating connectors of the same type with each other (though usually isn't good enough...), many were also then trying to connect outputs to outputs, as opposed to outputs to inputs. This would result in players then trying to overlap nodes on top of each other, thinking that the solution was then this:
We then realized that this would also be completely game-breaking as you'd have layering problems with being unable to access the node that you just let go of. Overall, watching people do this every time has been incredibly soul-destroying as it just feels like a personal failure on our end. It also causes people to just turn off from the game in the first 10 minutes.
So we've been hard at work at coming up with solutions. Initially we thought that using glows like this would fix it. Nope! Not only was it difficult to make them look visually in keeping with the rest of the game, players just weren't getting it...
Robin then had a better solution. What she produced below is the closest that we have ever been in getting this problem resolved:
Players have responded well to it, but sometimes the meaning of these short animations (there's quite a few) gets lost in translation and misconstrued. We also thought that our tutorial was going to be too long at 10 puzzles but we're likely going to have to either increase the count for a more gradual difficulty ramp or alternatively restructure to allow players more time in getting used to connecting & dragging functions. We'll be investigating these two possibilities for after 2.0 as we're behind where we wanted to be in getting this finished.
There's certainly been other challenges with the UI and level designs that we're fixing but on this problem, we're all ears from our readers and would love to hear from you either in the comments below or by sending us an email on any ideas you've got in how to solve this. Once we've got this problem out of the way, we'll be ready to start shipping 2.0 out (so please let us know your thoughts!).
I'll leave you with another gif to gaze at until the next update:
Ronan