Saturday 19 July 2014

Nix Development Video Series: Interior block puzzle



This video is a little bit late in making, the fix to this level was actually made a little while ago before the off the map opening event so since this fix we've had many new play-testers at both Nottingham and Cardiff to confirm that this new "non slippery" fix works.



Wednesday 16 July 2014

WGDS 2014



On the 11th we tested our most recent build of Nix at the Welsh Games Development Show in Cardiff. We were there with another team entering for the off the map contest from our university (Shady agents). The event was fantastic and again we got a lot of great feedback, we had a lot less bugs this time around but still found more fixes that we needed to apply. There were quite a lot of children who ended up playing our game and their honest feedback was really great to hear.

We found we had a few more collision issues and our main issue was people getting stuck in the starter cave as well as not knowing what to do next. At the show we would explain that players should look for two things "blue orbs" to collect and "orange glows" to lead into new areas which we later shortened to swim to anything that's blue or orange.  

To fix the goal confusion after the show we added a second menu to come after the control menu which very briefly explains the main goal of the game.


To remove the confusion of the first cave we decided to change our first teleport in that cave to orange to reinforce that orange portals lead to new areas. 

[Before]                                                                                                     [After]

As well as this a problem that has plagued us since the beginning (swimming down at slow speeds) was fixed soon after the show so the players hopefully should no longer be discouraged from swimming up too high. 

All in all WGDS was a fantastic play-testing opportunity and we thoroughly enjoyed our time there. 





Thursday 3 July 2014

GameCity 09 Launch party

Last week we traveled to Nottingham for the Gamecity launch party, where we got to display our game and have a few people test it, this experience was immeasurable for us playtesting wise. We got feedback from people with different experiences of play, some never having even held a controller before, most never having used a rift before.



We found a few bugs we hadn't expected which we will be working on over the following weeks, the main issues we picked up were as follows;

Certain areas didn't have collision (this allowed players to break out the map)

Glowing around spire confused players (most players went towards the large glow on the tower and were disappointed when it didnt lead anywhere)

Glitches with teleports in library level ( if the player chooses wrong sequence they cannot try again)

Missing textures

Player confusion with what their goal is (considering fixing this with a map of the area showing numbers of collectables)

Player struggles to climb waterfall in interior level (considering having the water level rise higher to help player get out)

We had positive feedback from everyone who played and thankfully had no nausea from anyone who played even after prolonged play. We will be aiming to get a lot of these bugs removed by July 11th as we will hopefully be showing Nix again at the Welsh Games Development show in Cardiff, this should hopefully give us even more player feedback so we can make Nix a more enjoyable experience for the off the map contest.