I'd be interested to know more specifics on the playtest and how the different players began to work and strategize.
So 6 people came on, including myself.
Only 1 other player and myself knew about how the game is 'supposed' to be played (the obey/disobey mechanic to keep control). We played for about 4 hours.
So at first the game was very chaotic, everyone constantly rushing the robot, and the robot instantly blasting whoever he could spot. To prevent people camping the door, waiting for someone to come in and then taking over I made it so that whenever anyone reaches the robot everyone gets respawned back to the edge of the map. This caused everyone to constantly rush since only the first player in counted. Myself and everyone agreed this was a frustrating mechanic and I have plans to address this.
The game played like this for about 45 mins, with the robot changing hands quickly among players. in the meantime I had begun to explain the intended mechanic. Nobody used the obey directives however until I, myself was able to take control and had enough money for a drop ship - which once I did I immediately purchased (to give them a spawn time) and as soon as I spotted people I started giving them orders and told them to obey if they want to live and if not I will kill them (to respawn into the drop ship). Some didn't listen, I killed them and then they started complaining a lot about having to wait in the drop ship (which was set to 2.5 mins until each drop off). They were unable to destroy the drop ship so they were very frustrated.
After playing like this for a bit and a lot of complaining, I restarted the server with 2 changes:
- halfed the drop ship time
- made 2x easier to destroy dropship
One player logged out of the game.
At this point the intended gameplay started to emerge, sporadically. Some players still thought 'kill everything that moves' was the best strategy. After about another hour though, players were regularly destroying the drop ship and using the obey mechanic almost every time they took the robot. What we started noticing is that the drop ship almost never helped the person who bought it, but the next player to take over. I have plans to fix this too, we'll see how it works out. At this point, people started to try to trick the robot... the robot player would say 'load this here' and they might hide the object in the shadow of the loading area (
the grey box in the screenshot above) instead of placing it IN the box, or they would try to hide in the water, or wander off while placing a wall.
After about another hour, pretty much everyone was trying to get each other build walls and load rockets and uranium (uranium is purchased for $20 and can be redeemed for $60 by the robot if he can coerce someone to load it into his loading area). Uranium was the hardest to get people to load. At this point the first player who left, came back in (he did not witness the gameplay where people tried to keep control through coersion). He basically said 'screw this' and injected again the 'kill everything that moves mechanic' and if he inherited a drop ship he would immediately spawn kill anyone who it dropped into the map. This led to him losing his drop ship very quickly and everyone spawning loose again every time he took control, which caused his control to never last long (as intended). Interestingly, this caused him to become frustrated (he was losing, and the game was behaving unexpectedly to him) as he was very easily being put in the drop ship by the other players. I see this as a problem because the game was not yet able to communicate to him how to play to win - (and even I am not certain yet that trying to coerce the others is how to play to win). However, even though this player had the lowest score and things feel like they are going in the general direction I want, a lot more testing has to be done.
Another important takeaway was that players that obeyed were clearly not being rewarded enough. I hadn't yet added a feature where the robot player can pay the other players to obey, which I will add before the next play test in the hopes that it will address this issue.
So things looked pretty good, considering this was the first serious playtest and stress test. There is a lot of work and refinement to be done, it still was a very 'playtesty' experience to play.