First outside playtest results.

This past Friday, the 15th of November, we were able to demo the early stages of our game to a group of people.  For this we came up with two levels.  One of them was very basic and the other was rather difficult.

The difficulty of the second level was a little too high for most of the players, indicating that we would need more levels to teach the players by giving them a more sloped learning curve.

Several other issues about the game were reinforced by the playtesters.

1. There were not very clear instructions on what to do.  The end goal was not immediately obvious, and so players at first did not see the puzzle as a puzzle.  This lead to some of the other issues.

2.  It was not immediately obvious that the player could select the room.  This was caused by a lack of direction, as well as a core feature that was not implemented as well as it could have been.  Players would often have the right idea and try to select the room, but would be unable to do so because they were standing in it.  Their natural first instinct was to move into the room, inadvertently making them unable to select the room in "hacker" view (top down perspective).

3.  The above two issues were apparent in the first level.  In the second level, which is probably one of the later single room no button levels, players became disoriented in the room.  This is likely due to the fact that they have had very little time (one level ) to actually acclimate to the game, as well as the fact that they could not see where their first person camera was while looking at the top down perspective.  This lead to confusion, and took away their focus on actually completing the puzzle to trying to figure out where they were.

4. This is a relatively minor one.  Players could not see where the doors (holes in the cube) were, and it hindered their progress in completing the level.  Instead of rotating the level to a point where they could exit or enter the cube, they found the way out using trial and error, without actually trying to think about the level from the top down perspective and relating it to the first person perspective.

I will make another post later on to hopefully put down some possible solutions to these issues, as well as other observations from the unofficial playtest.

Photo Dump 1

This first image is of the firewall de-activation panel. Many of our textures have yet to be developed, so we are still using flat colors.

This next series of photos shows the room being rotated, including rotating the room in a way where a wall hits the door you are on. The white hallway was added to establish points of entry and exit between rooms, as it is planned to have room rotation disabled for where your character is.

This is the room rotation view, complete with buttons. The room becomes transparent when it is selected, allowing you a limited view into the room. Although there is no close up, the red line in these pictures is the firewall that the button panel will disable.

Zero Point Zero

Here are a couple early screenshots of our game. 

The top screenshot shows our first person 3d viewpoint and the following two show the top down "bird's eye" viewpoint.  The green blip is the location of the first person camera.  This is simply a testing environment for the technical and gameplay aspects.  The 3 colored squares/cubes were used to test selecting specific entities in the space from the top down perspective.  The rest of the level is actually 2 layers with the blue rectangles being ramps.  This was to demonstrate the lack of depth perception and limited knowledge of the layout while viewing from a top down view.