Cycle 1 Review

We got to work through 3 rounds of feedback this cycle, firstly our planned work from when we did a Maker’s Massive demo, and then the feedback from our discord community, and finally the feedback from our latest demo night, which was incredibly valuable. At our last demo, we had 10 people play it and go through our new tutorial mode, test controller game play, try out the new character creator, and play with our new power card art!

Also had valuable feedback from some seasoned devs around direction and game play mechanics.

We play tested our self hosted web version using a controller, and with touch input and stylus on an ipad.

I put a bunch of more technical review notes here.

Feedback#

Some of the things players spoke about:

• Rules are too much to read
  The first demo just had a plain text version of the rules, and few people could understand it, especially while at the loud, busy meetup. So one of the first changes was creating a tutorial mode with a character to talk the player through the rules, and we broke them down into simpler chunks the player could explore. This was much better, and most people understood the basic game play concepts when testing the new version.

• Still too much rule reading, not enough interactive tut
  Players still wanted more hovering, hints and tooltip type exploration of the game, not just dialogue. This helped us see how we needed to show players how to play, and leave the dialogue for banter and options.

• Hard to see whats happening
  After the refactor for multiplayer, some animations, card effects and impacts on the board had been lost, especially of the opponent’s moves. It made it hard to tell what was happening. We knew this going in to the demo, but it was still good to have feedback on it to validate our understanding.

• Controller feeling
  Our joystick implementation was feeling too rapid and unpredictable for players to use, so they were using the dpad more than we had tested for. Got some great, specific feedback around this. We have since adjusted that all, and the joystick and dpad feel much better. We’ve also added button prompts on input areas now so players know what to press.

We didn’t get to make saving your character work by the time we demoed at the meetup, and it was interesting to see how many people were excited about the creator and then disappointed they couldn’t play with their character. Which was weirdly validating! Players like ideating themselves in a new world before committing to gameplay.

Progress#

We refactored for multiplayer, which fixed some bugs and performance issues. More details here

Solidified visual direction with new deck backs and card style with the new power card art and animations. Very textural, layered colors and splats of paint, lines of chalk and bold brush strokes.

Fixed a bunch of layout issues, now it’s playable at most resolutions. Learnt a lot about control nodes and how Godot manages them.

Created custom theme for the UI and dialogue boxes.

Finished character creator. Setup the creator scene to choose all your characters features and it now saves so you can play the game with your custom character!

Added a new card fan component for the player hand that allowed controller support for joysticks and dpads. Also fixed some controller issues after feedback, which included button prompts.

Created a title screen that plays while the game loads in the background, and a global audio manager making for seamless transitions and continuous soundtrack.

Added a dialogue manager for our NPCs, guides and between game banter.

Created an NPC base character with a series of animations for reacting to different dialogue options, card effects, and events like winning and losing. Added some vfx like bobbing, breathing, blinking and beat matched bouncing to the music playing.

Tutorial game mode with our frenemy Bobby! We learnt a lot about how to explain rules and mechanics to players, and the psychological elements of dialogue, banter and opponent reactions. The play testing really helped with this. And we’ve realised having your adversary teach you how to play the game might not be the best approach.