Feedback / User Testing Post!

I asked a couple of dudes to test the game out so far, awesome thanks to those that gave it a shot. Anyways, Dream Hunter has been in the hands of some merciless game designers I know and I've noticed a trend coming from them:

1. It is unclear where the platforms are located in the level because they are the same colour as the foreground trees.

2. The platforms in the middleground are nearly the same tone as the platforms in the foreground. They percieve to be on the same layer, confusing the platforms that do react with player in the foreground (1. might fix this).

3. Not enough visual feedback on the objective in the levels and the controls.

4. The health particle setting doesn't not reset to full green particle health when the player dies and restarts. Also, The character's position doesn't not reset back to the beginning of the level when the player falls into a pit.

5. lack of animation and gameplay (gameplay I'm still working on, a majority of my time was spent in building the game engine in Flash,now that Ive done most of that I'll be concentrating more on this)

I will try fix these problems asap, but The GDD is in need of a phoenix down.

Health Particle Setting/System

These are the instances when the feedback changes according to the characters health, this gives the possibility of having a connection between the hero and the environment (and also other things, but I'll stick to only showing a more sophisticated health display for the prototype.

full health: 100%



70%



50%



30%



10%

DH Menu

...the menu interface with the logo. I will probabily redo this because I've had some user feedback on it and there were a few problems of the title being unclear such as the glow on the title makes it harder to read, the animation embedding into the title is too slow and there is no visual feedback when hovering over the start and options button. These will be sorted when I have the other higher priority things out of the way. I had a thought of sutley placing a much clearer version of the title inside of the background in the first level, where letters would appear in and amongst the parallaxing trees.

Menu Interface Designs & HUD redesign

...I've been designing the menu interface, and experimenting with some cool gradient shading in Flash. These are some of the different variations I was thinking on using, but I've chosen to use the interface design uderneath the start game and options text. I have also redesigned the in-game interface because I was having some problems with it (see previous post), but now I think it works well within the levels (urh, except from geting lost in the 2nd level, argh).



This is a sample of the orb collection and inventory interface. The orb collection presents the new feedback of upgraded abilities. As for my initial design of the inventory was going to be include as a seperate interface outside of the game, but this would break up the flow, so I changed it to an in-game inventory interface. The HUD presents these new abilities by extending its link to include another guage. Each link added to the orginal guage increases the level and power of a special ability, but this special requires more orbs to execute on harder enemies.
The inventory can be selected by holding down the left trigger on the 360 controller and items inside the inventory can be scrolled by using the dirctional keys while holding down the left trigger and pressing A to use the item.

HUD - Progress

Hey... this is what the interface looks like in game, but im still not 100% satisfied with it yet, there are some problems with its clarity and it not standing out from the background, anyways it was suppose to look like a dreamcatcher thing but it evolved into a cog thing instead. The small squeares are the visual feedback for the orb collection, the colour of the orb in the interface gets stronger until it is placed in the front of the cube, this means that the power-up is ready to deploy (again, this might be hard to see, so I might go back to the progression of a circle shaped visual feedback for the orb collection that gradually fills up the gauge), I also think that the circular interface breaks apart from the background so that it is easier to see by the player, but the colour needs to change because it merges into the dark areas of the background.

Level 2: ParticlesIllusion Rendering Test

...experimenting in ParticlesIllusion 3, I'm trying to represent abstract leaves that fall from the trees as an alternative visual feedback for the player's health. The Health Particle Setting (HPS) is one of the selling points of my game. It harminously changes from green to red (green being good health and red is critica low health), I have explained it in a previous post in more depth, so if you want more info, go back to the older posts to find out more. I have made the particle's die off when they hit the ground and added some parameters that create different variations of size and velocity of particles, such as making bigger particles move slower than the smaller ones, add motion random and a wind force so that they simulate leaves falling.

I'm still having some minor problems with setting the particles so that they loop continuously, also each frame sequence of particles have to be saved out as PNG.files because ParticlesIllusion doesnt support AVIs with an alpha channel or 32 bit AVIs, so I've stuck to rendering the sequence of particles as PNGs with alpha, but this leads to even more problems of file sizes. For each frame of particles saved as PNG it is about 30kb, so if it as a sequence of 300 frames, this could slow down the processing of the flash game, argh trying to find ways of lowering this size. I have tested this out in Flash with a sequence of 10 frames, they are no slowdowns with this amount, but with a constant loop of 300 frames plus another 300 for the bad health feedback of the HPS will dramatically slow down the performance in flash. I now really need to consider the memory usage and if the game is feasible in running it without having lag and freeze problems that will detract the player from the experience of the game, especially in a fast-paced game like this one.

This is what the Health Particles Setting looks like with the character having full health. I will get back to you with any solutions to this problem.

Level 3: Progress

...just finished vectorizing the 3rd level, urhh, this time I vectorized it straight into Flash because I was having problems with Illustator. well, the problem wasn't Illustrator, but how it was exporting the ai.files, for some reason I would have massive slowdowns in the parallax scrolling background when importing the Illustrator files from the previous levels I did. I think when Flash converts an ai. file into one movie clip it would have more movie clips inside of that one. I tried breaking them apart, but it would sometimes get rid of the art entirely, argh. So I opted to do it in Flash, I could possibly get the same desired effect I want from Illustrator, without the big file size and lag...so yays, now I need to incorporate some atmospheric effects such as mist and dark clouds. I need to make the particle health setting a part of the atmosphere for this level, it will be done in ParticlesIllusion, but that is for another post so see ya then.

Level Designs - Level 3

...hey ya'll, sorry, long time no post, just finishing some concepts for the 3 levels and some character designs that need vectorising in Illustrator, and then importing into Flash. For the 3rd level I was trying to get the right conceptualisation of the game environment, looking at its design and visualisation.

Garath Sleightholme is a tutor that has been teaching us the production elements of creating environments and identifying their cultural influences and the visual research required to make a functional concept design. He has been very helpful in the researching and why things look like they do. I am also aware of how the aesthetics of the game can be procedural in depicting gameplay elements.

I've added a collapsed bridge, this creates more depth and atmosphere into the level. I think I'll be using some of the concepts for prologue scenes at the begginning of the level, but wont go into too much backstory as I want the player to start brawling as soon as possible, but because some things have an higher prioriety on the load to do things list and certain time constraints I might not have time to do these things. I could try do something in-game that illustrates the story). The next step is to finalise the 3 levels in Flash (I have been doing this, but not quite finished, still need to put them inside the parallax). I also need to start with the design document over easter. Kay...lots to do and post, I'll be back with more.