Playtest questions

[JacobGarneau]

• How difficult did you find the game to be? What elements made it difficult (or not)?
• If you found the game difficult, would you say it was "the good kind" of difficult or was the difficulty more annoying/stressful than anything?
• Did you feel like you were able to properly understand the impact your actions had on the game's environment?
• Did you feel like you were able to maintain your sense of direction throughout the the game?
• Did you feel like your abilities (rotating the room, pulling green blocks) made the game more interesting than if you didn't have them?
• How easily were you able to understand/master the controls of the game?
• How clear did you find the game's visual language to be (for example, different colors and shapes being used to differentiate elements)
• Would you be interested in playing a longer game (with an actual narrative and better visuals, among other things) based around this core concept?
• Do you have any suggestions on what you would improve in terms of mechanics and gameplay?

[CassandraRousseau]

• The game was quite tricky. The controls made the game difficult to complete.
• The level of difficulty was annoying sometimes. I suggest you create a progressive path of difficulty.
• It was easy to understand the impact of the player's actions on the environment.
• Sometimes, it was hard to keep your direction throughout the game due to the multiple actions you needed to achieve in a short amount of time. I also noticed that the camera was not fixed or constrained, which made me lose my sense of direction each time I moved my mouse.
• The abilities do make the game more interesting!
• It was a bit challenging to master the commands. Pressing multiple buttons simultaneously was sometimes not easy to achieve (e.g., pressing Spacebar to jump, while pressing W and D to move, while pressing E to rotate, etc. ). Also, I noticed the mouse controls do not work? I tried to press the left or right mouse buttons near a green platform, and neither of them seemed to work on my hand.
• The game is visually clear! No doubt!
• If the level of difficulty is progressive, yes!
• Making progressive gameplay, trying to balance the controls on the surface (e.g., using the arrow keys instead of WASD to move the character, easier to use both hands to achieve the commands), and adding a soundtrack in the background (How about playing a note each time the character reaches a new cube? That would be interesting!)

[danielcacatian]

• The game was definitely challenging. The elements that made this game difficult are the main mechanics (rotation and push/pull). There’s a learning curve to master these mechanics.
• In terms of the difficulty, I find the game to be a somewhat “good” kind of difficulty. After you figure out how to get past an obstacle, it's difficult to mess it up again when you restart, but I say “good” in quotes because you’re bound to mess up every now and then, and then restart from the start which gets repetitive. It is nothing major however and it can be solved easily.
• I was able to understand the impact of my actions quite later during the gameplay. I saw how some platforms didn’t rotate when I would shift the rotation of the space. It was neat.
• I had a hard time maintaining my sense of direction as I continued playing because of the rotation keys. There were times when I would think instinctively that the E key would rotate counter-clockwise because it's above the key that makes you move RIGHT. This made me think of a clock ticking towards the right (i.e., counter-clockwise). After a while though, I got used to it and was able to maintain my sense of direction.
• In terms of the two abilities, the rotating ability was a lot more impactful than the pushing and pulling one mainly because there really wasn’t a scenario where I had to push an object back down. Pulling was always the solution. The pushing and pulling is a neat mechanic, however, but like all things, it can surely be modified.
• As I mentioned in the first question, the mechanics have a small learning curve and were a bit difficult to master. I found myself testing the limits of these abilities and how they function in 3D space. It is only through trial and error that I manage to master the controls.
• Personally, the visual language was a bit hard to distinguish due to the lighting. The lighting was quite harsh which cast a bunch of shadows and made the platforms turn a bit red-ish. It disrupted the visual language a bit, but not enough to ruin my gameplay.
• I’d love to see a full-fledged game centred around this core concept. I find that this genre of mind-fu**ing hasn’t been touched in a while. Plus, everyone likes to get their mind blown.
• In terms of a prototype, my only suggestion is to allow the player to learn each mechanic at the start of the game. This can easily be done with a simple room that focuses on one mechanic, and another room with the other. This way, the player knows their abilities first-hand before jumping into the obstacle course instead of just dropping the player in and having them learn themselves through trial and error.