Time for another one of those!
As expected I can’t work as much on the project now that I’m working full time on something else (I’m having a great time there though and I do need to eat & pay the bills). I won’t apologize for the lack of regularity as I already talked about it on my first message.
I was so terribly tired last devlog that I completely forgot to showcase the tool I made that started the idea of writing something about tools. So here it is, almost a month later, the ‘mirror level’ shortcut:
It’s pretty self-explanatory. The orientation of levels doesn’t have any gameplay impact so I try to rotate them in a way that makes them easy to read as well as easy and/or interesting to access in the open world (considering the surrounding levels and obstacles that could get in the way of the entrance). Sometimes rotation doesn’t do it though and I need a good old mirroring!
(the rabbit isn’t part of the level, it just snaps to the entrance automatically because the gif was taken in my ‘individual level’ test scene)
That said, it is time to get into the most important part of this devlog:
Playtests!I’ve dedicated these last weeks to individual playtest sessions using screenshare and live commentary. I’ve had a playtest per day during the first week and then a few more for players who wanted to go further into the game.
These playtests were a way for me to look at the overall structure of the game and see how the beginning sections worked. How fast players learn some of the mechanics and interactions, the difficulty curve, overall understanding of the game, etc.
This was a great experience and the playtests went really well, proving the beginning of the game to be quite solid and the learning process fairly smooth. They helped me fix a few issues here and there as well as get to have a better understanding of the duration of the game.
Most players took from 1h30 to 2h to complete the first area, which means the game might have around 10+ hours of gameplay. This is a lot more than I expected originally and I fear it’s creeping into the “too long” zone, I don’t want playing the game to become some kind of chore. I also have to take in mind that these playtests were exempt of any characters and dialogues, which might extend the playtime even more.
Now let’s talk about one of the most interesting sections of the game to have evolved during these playtests.
This is ‘the escape’, or The Path of the Warrior as some rabbits like to call it. It happens to be the first challenge of the game, linking the player’s very open starting area in the south to the more intricate, level-filled open world. Please ignore the bridge to the right.
The screenshot above shows what the Path looked like during the first few playtests I did. It is not technically the first iteration of it, but we will call it version 1 for the sake of clarity.
As I said, this is the very first challenge of the game. The purpose of this very narrow path is to force the player to think about their movement rather than rotate around randomly. Because of the shape of the path, you have to be wary of your position, or your ears might block you in a certain way or push you down the water.
This first version however was extremely difficult, way too frustrating for players who haven’t even had the chance to really experience the game yet (remember, the levels come after this!). In this version, I essentially ask the player to be in one specific position on their starting spot, any other position will result in falling over or getting stuck, but they have to figure it out for themselves.
Watching players struggle here, I realized that this was way too much to ask of players who are still learning how to move. All I want to do is have the player understand that they must think about how they move, but I shouldn’t place them before such a solid brick wall.
I therefore went and did a revision of this Path for subsequent playtests:
So of course this shape might not mean much to you if you haven’t played the game, but basically it is opening more options to the player. Instead of having to find the one specific position to “solve” the challenge, they now only have to understand the relative way they need to orient their rabbit and can do so from any starting tile.
This proved better, as the openness of the starting zone gives so many options to the player, finding the single solution to a path proved way too demanding.
However, players still had a bit too much trouble for my taste here. You see, in the game the camera in much more zoomed in, so players never see the full path at a time on the screen. This makes predicting your movement very difficult for beginners, and because the path is so narrow, it doesn’t allow for any mistakes, or step-by-step trial and error (which is a big component of this kind of puzzle games).
I therefore went to my third and so far final iteration, which I am quite satisfied with:
This single bloc added in the corner solves a lot of problems!
It actually turns the path in a two steps process. Once you’ve reached this little square, you have room for movement to realign yourself and tackle the second part. You still get to learn the same thing as the previous path, but you’re allowed to get it wrong and not have to restart all over again.
This proved pretty effective among testers, some said they liked how it made them think about their movement, and other barely noticed it was happening. This is exactly the intended kind of reactions for this challenge so I am quite happy with it! Of course that doesn’t mean it’s perfect, and it might get changed multiple times in the future, but it was a good learning and iterating process, that I could hardly have done without playtesters. As the dev, my knowledge of the game makes these kind of beginner challenges extremely trivial;I didn’t realize the actual difficulty of the challenge.
I also removed some of the blocs to the north, as they didn’t serve any purpose, and if a player accidentally rotated on them a bunch of time, it could get hard to enter the first level, which really isn’t supposed to be a challenging part.
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Now that these first playtests are done, I’ll focus on fixing some of the issues I’ve noticed and implementing a save system. With the save system in, I’ll more easily be able to have ongoing playtests while working on the game. I really value live playtests, and the screenshare format was really effective, but they are hard to organize and I feel like it’s asking a lot from people. I’ll keep them for new playtesters trying the game for the first time, and I’ll simply update builds for others who’ll be able to record themselves playing whenever they feel like it.
I am still not looking for more playtesters though, the bunch I have is already enough that early in development.
That’s it for this small post about playtests. I hope you enjoyed, thank you to everyone who reads these, I’ll see you in rabbit hell!
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