The Importance of Player Feedback & Subgoals: Playtest Results - 03/14/2014

I had a quick playtest session with some close friends the other day. I've been making good progress on the game (which is yet to be titled, but lets refer to it by its working name, Overtime). I'd just added vertical axis shooting which I wanted to playtest and I also needed to get some real world QA done as testing a local multiplayer only game is proving difficult.

Here is a clip from one of the recordings I took.

Importance of Feedback

My biggest initial take away is the importance of player feedback for even the smallest actions. From jumping to obtaining a frag, there needs to be feedback provided. The player not only needs to be given feedback to assure his actions are executed, but to be rewarded for the things he does and make them worth doing again. Feedback can be provided in numerous ways, from elegant sprite animations, to subtle or acute particle effects. A small, brief dramatic sequence to a frag can make the frag all the more rewarding, thrilling and special as so awesomely done in Samurai Gunn.

A player swats back another players bullet for a kill in Samurai Gunn.

I quickly added some rudimentary blood splatter particles the day before the playtest to help provide feedback, but I feel it wasn't enough and lost its novelty very quickly. I've since tweaked the blood splatter to project based on the direction of the fatal projectile, tiles around the player corpse become bloody, added  flying gibs and even created dramatic John Woo like slow motion effect when the player is killed. All of these small layers of feedback will hopefully make obtaining player frags more rewarding beyond just increasing a frag score. Simply firing projectiles at other players may be fun at first, but if the overall presentation of the actions is bland and boring, player won't be interested in playing for long.

Fragging a demon with a shotgun in Overtime

Importance of Subgoals

Currently, Overtime has only one goal, kill all other players. There is very little else the player needs to focus on or worry about. This is a problem, as the game gets boring quickly. Once you've killed the other players a handful of times, you've experienced all that there is to offer and lose interest in playing any further.

It could be argued that platforming (successfully negotiating jumps to make your desired mark) and ammo management (collecting ammo packs to ensure you always have ammo) are also subgoals, but I feel they are too subtle. This just may be the nature of simple deathmatch mode in general; I do plan to add other game modes which will add more exciting subgoals for the player I'm sure.

Samurai Gunn has environmental hazards and destructibles. This give players more subgoals, avoid accidental deaths and shape your environment to your advantage (you can destroy certain tiles to the point where they become hazards). Players in Samurai Gunn can also engage in defensive actions, engaging in mini sword fights to parry player attacks and swatting back player bullets. This not only gives players a grander sense of control over their ultimate fate, but an entirely different set of actions and required skills.

This was a great round of playtesting and really highlighted serious gaps in Overtime's design, which I'll need to address. The above GIF of Samurai Gunn does such an incredible job of summing up the entire game, its mechanics, the level of polish and feedback, goals and dimensions in just under a second of gameplay. If you need longer than a second to capture the total essence of your game, you should step back and start rethinking your design.