Weekly Progress Report #6: Difficulty Ramp
[h2]Playtesting[/h2]
Early on this week I did a couple of playtests with people who had never played the game before. Playtests are super interesting, because you get to see the kinds of things people do when they've never seen your game. I'm frequently surprised and occasionally confused by the way people interact with the game.
Something that became clear after these playtests was the fact that the introductory levels don't introduce mechanics quite as well as I thought they did. The controls are relatively simple, so people understand them pretty much immediately, but how to think about moving around in the world is another story.
This playtest also showed me that the initial levels spike in difficulty much too quickly for novice players. My wife (who doesn't play 3D games), had a ton of fun on level 1, beat level 2 like a pro, but quit on level 3 because it started to get frustrating. Up until that playtest, I honestly wasn't thinking about people who don't normally play games as part of my potential audience, but they should be! Games are for everyone!
This reminded me of the problems I ran into with the very first playtest I did. In that original playtest, I created a single tutorial level, which was supposed to require the player to demonstrate all of the skills they would need in order to play any level that came later. It was terrible! One of my friends said "this is the hardest game I've ever played in my life". After that playtest I went back and broke the level into 5 individual levels, each focusing on a single aspect of controlling your character.
Something that all of these playtests have demonstrated is something that I forget: This game is kind of hard to control even at its most basic.
A rough approximation of the difficulty curve.
In a game like Mario, your character moves right when you push right, moves left when you push left, and jumps when you push jump. Changing your direction is straight forward, simple and almost immediate. By contrast, PogoChamp requires a decent amount of finesse to do even the most basic things, like move forward. I need to allow players several opportunities early on to practice those basic mechanics before introducing new, more complicated things. That required adding some new levels, and also changing existing intro levels to more clearly demonstrate the skills players should be learning.
I'm very happy with the new introductory levels, but I'm sure they'll need additional tweaking over time.
[h2]New Computer[/h2]
This week I also built a new computer! I was pretty excited for the new 3080 graphics cards, but they sold out instantly so I'm still using my old 970. Still though, the upgrade has been significant. It turns out computers from 10 years ago are a little bit slow compared to modern tech.
Unfortunately my old motherboard doesn't have a display out connection, so if I want to get files off of it I need to swap the graphics card between computers, so I haven't transferred any of my files.
[h2]Metrics Website[/h2]
Something else I've been working on a bit is making my own metrics website for PogoChamp. Unity Analytics are basically advertising focused, and aren't GDPR compliant, so they really don't match my needs. I've been working on a simple DB endpoint that I can send analytics to. It should be done in the next week or so, and when it is I'll disable Unity Analytics and use this version instead.
[h2]Bug of the Week[/h2]
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) no bug of the week this week. There weren't any big or interesting bugs I found.
Have a great weekend!
Early on this week I did a couple of playtests with people who had never played the game before. Playtests are super interesting, because you get to see the kinds of things people do when they've never seen your game. I'm frequently surprised and occasionally confused by the way people interact with the game.
Something that became clear after these playtests was the fact that the introductory levels don't introduce mechanics quite as well as I thought they did. The controls are relatively simple, so people understand them pretty much immediately, but how to think about moving around in the world is another story.
This playtest also showed me that the initial levels spike in difficulty much too quickly for novice players. My wife (who doesn't play 3D games), had a ton of fun on level 1, beat level 2 like a pro, but quit on level 3 because it started to get frustrating. Up until that playtest, I honestly wasn't thinking about people who don't normally play games as part of my potential audience, but they should be! Games are for everyone!
This reminded me of the problems I ran into with the very first playtest I did. In that original playtest, I created a single tutorial level, which was supposed to require the player to demonstrate all of the skills they would need in order to play any level that came later. It was terrible! One of my friends said "this is the hardest game I've ever played in my life". After that playtest I went back and broke the level into 5 individual levels, each focusing on a single aspect of controlling your character.
Something that all of these playtests have demonstrated is something that I forget: This game is kind of hard to control even at its most basic.
A rough approximation of the difficulty curve.In a game like Mario, your character moves right when you push right, moves left when you push left, and jumps when you push jump. Changing your direction is straight forward, simple and almost immediate. By contrast, PogoChamp requires a decent amount of finesse to do even the most basic things, like move forward. I need to allow players several opportunities early on to practice those basic mechanics before introducing new, more complicated things. That required adding some new levels, and also changing existing intro levels to more clearly demonstrate the skills players should be learning.
I'm very happy with the new introductory levels, but I'm sure they'll need additional tweaking over time.
[h2]New Computer[/h2]
This week I also built a new computer! I was pretty excited for the new 3080 graphics cards, but they sold out instantly so I'm still using my old 970. Still though, the upgrade has been significant. It turns out computers from 10 years ago are a little bit slow compared to modern tech.
Unfortunately my old motherboard doesn't have a display out connection, so if I want to get files off of it I need to swap the graphics card between computers, so I haven't transferred any of my files.
[h2]Metrics Website[/h2]
Something else I've been working on a bit is making my own metrics website for PogoChamp. Unity Analytics are basically advertising focused, and aren't GDPR compliant, so they really don't match my needs. I've been working on a simple DB endpoint that I can send analytics to. It should be done in the next week or so, and when it is I'll disable Unity Analytics and use this version instead.
[h2]Bug of the Week[/h2]
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) no bug of the week this week. There weren't any big or interesting bugs I found.
Have a great weekend!