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[Laitch]

Hi everyone. We are master students from Aalborg University Copenhagen in Denmark. In the current semester we have developed an Action Adventure Platform game in Unity 3d and we need your help to test it. Since our game is research, you will have to fill out some questionnaires during the game.

To make sure our test results are not biased we cannot tell you what we are testing for and we can only share limited information about the game content . We hope you are still intrigued to try it anyway.

The premise:
You are Subject 5 - the latest prototype in a new project aspiring to create the perfect secret agent.
Before you can go into the field, your reflexes and cognitive abilities must be tested to ensure stability.
Complete your training by going through a set of lab tests.



The game: http://www.laitch.com/MED7/

We encourage you to share the game link with friends, pretty much anyone, but do not tell them what the game is about, because that might bias our results. We would really appreciate it!

Do not post/spoil anything specific about the game/story/characters/gameplay/etc. in the comments below if you have played the game, thank you  .

[teoma]

I loooooove the survey thing you guys made.  I might steal that idea from you, I wish I had thought of doing that sooner.

[Quicksand-S]

Well, my first "big" issue with it is the title/logo. That "J" doesn't look anything like a "J". If you removed the top two dashes, it might.

The second issue was the survey being annoying, but I see that it's a required element for your project.


Note: The rest of this post is about gameplay/design/art suggestions, but if this isn't the sort of feedback you want, feel free to ignore it. I didn't complete the game (because of all the questions), and from your post it seems maybe there's something else you're looking for input on.


I would recommend fixing the jerky animations of the character (especially when first accelerating) and maybe making the character extend spread its legs more when running so that they actually take large steps. A small touch that can make things look more polished is if the character animates while falling (ex. extending legs a bit to prepare for landing).

Hitting the ceiling should not make me float. It should probably set my vertical speed to zero instantly or it looks/feels really wrong in a "realistic"-looking game like this. For the same reason, holding the jump key probably shouldn't make the character bounce.

The graphics weren't terrible but considering the actual lighting looks decent, I felt like it really needed shadows to go along with it.


I wouldn't have minded trying it more, but I would probably only give it more of a chance if the survey was only at the end and not stuck in between gameplay sections. Sorry. It's a little sad, because you make it sound quite intriguing.

[chaosTechnician]

I started playing the game and left feedback.  I hope it sends feedback during the game and not just at the end because I encountered a bug that required me to restart the game to recover, and I'm not particularly interested in going through the game again to leave all the same feedback.

The bug involved getting stuck to/dragged by a moving platform passing overhead (the one that blocks a camera).  I quickly crouched and stood back up as the moving platform passed over me, so I was standing with my upper body inside the platform.  When it moved, it dragged me across that bridge where I crouched again and crawled out from under it.  From that point on, when that platform moved, I moved with it.  This caused me to get pushed through a wall and out of the level.  With no discernible way to reset myself, I refreshed the page, losing my progress.

The short version of my feedback was this (yeah, this is shorter than what I had already written):

• The game is very slowly paced.  The first few levels don't need so much physical space between the introductory elements.
• Visually, the game is very bland and disparate.  The character's appearance and the lava textures don't feel like they fit the rest of the aesthetic (possibly because they aren't grey or black...)
• There was no challenge to speak of.  The puzzles lacked difficulty, having fairly obvious solutions.
• I understand that you don't want parts of the game spoiled here so I'll try to be a little vague with this, but Red is a color usually reserved for things that will hurt you, not for things you're supposed to trigger.
• Another bit of feedback I'll try to keep non-specific: Q mode removes all difficulty from the switch "puzzles" because it eliminates any ambiguity.
• The ratio of survey to gameplay left a lot to be desired.  I realize you're doing research on this game but answering the same set of questions after just a few minutes of slowly paced gameplay had resulted in me answering nearly all the open-ended quesitons with "same as before" by the second or third time through; nothing had changed in the small amount of gameplay.  Consider changing the format, frequency, or repetitiveness of the questions.

I think you've got some potential here but there are a large number of elements getting in the way of it right now.

[Laitch]

@teoma - thank you ... normally we test these things in a lab environment where we can hand out paper questionnaires but we wanted to try something new and let people play at home so we needed an in game questionnaire

@Quicksand-S - Yeah the logo was just sort of putted together in 5 minutes :-/ Thank you for all the feedback. I'm sorry you didn't finish because of the questionnaires. It's a balance to try to make them long enough for us to get the data we need without annoying the player to much (because lets face it: questionnaires are annoying). We really can't go much shorter/fewer then what we have here, and still get enough data to be able to conclude on something when we handin

@chaosTechnician - Thank you for all the feedback, sorry about the bug... sadly we don't send the data until the end . But thank you so much for trying it out anyway

[Laitch]

Thank you to everyone who has tested so far. We only need a few more test participants and then we have enough. So if you have the time and feel like helping us, then please try our game!

[jmptable]

I attempted to play and made it to the first checkpoint. As soon as the feedback page opened everything froze. I'm using Chrome on Windows 7. It was still running but extremely slowly with a few seconds between frames, and froze up the browser as well.

Maybe it's something up with my system, but I thought I'd let you guys know. Best of luck with the project.

[kinglake]

I attempted to play and made it to the first checkpoint. As soon as the feedback page opened everything froze. I'm using Chrome on Windows 7. It was still running but extremely slowly with a few seconds between frames, and froze up the browser as well.

Maybe it's something up with my system, but I thought I'd let you guys know. Best of luck with the project.

Same issue, Chrome and Windows 7 here too.

[Laitch]

@jmptable & kinglake - Thats strange, I've never heard about that bug before. It's probably not going to be fixed since I have no idea what could cause it and we now have the data we need. But thank you for trying anyway.

Even though we have the minimum amount of data we need we can always use more (the more the better) so if you want to, then please feel free to try our game

[chaosTechnician]

I attempted to play and made it to the first checkpoint. As soon as the feedback page opened everything froze. I'm using Chrome on Windows 7. It was still running but extremely slowly with a few seconds between frames, and froze up the browser as well.

Maybe it's something up with my system, but I thought I'd let you guys know. Best of luck with the project.

Same issue, Chrome and Windows 7 here too.

Weird.  I used Win7 and Chrome and everything worked fine for me earlier.
But, I just tried again and now, when the Unity WebPlayer loads, I get less than a second of sound effects then the sounds stop and the webplayer just shows an error:

The content was stopped because a fatal content error has been detected.