Étienne - Playtest Feedback

[atienn]

1. The game had severe performance issues for something of its scope which definitely made it harder to play initially (more on that below). Otherwise, I don't think it was all that difficult when taking things slowly and treating the game as a puzzle.
2. Definitely the good kind. I found the game was much more exciting when NOT treating it like a puzzle and being totally reckless. The game gives a sense of flow when continuously moving forwards without stopping to consider what is the best course of action is. I find that desperately trying to pull a block or quickly rotating the world when mid-air in order to stick a landing combined with aforementioned flow is the best thing the game has to offer. If that was the intent, you could probably encourage this playstyle by having a second deathwall chase the player.
3. Of course they made the game more interesting. Without them you'd just have a bland 3D platformer.
4. I have some decent experience with first-person games, so everything felt quite natural. I got good at rotating the world (and beat the game) after roughly 15 attempt.
5. Clear for me, but I'm not colorblind in any way. To truly make it accessible you could have the interactable blocks have a different texture (striped or something of the sort) to distinguish them.
6. Yes. Though I'm not sure what a narrative would add to the game. I imagine a longer version the game as being Rayman-like game where there isn't really any story and all of the focus and efforts are put onto the gameplay and making levels. Then again, it depends on what your vision for the game is.
7. The core mechanic is good. I find all it would need is more game elements to spice up levels (bounce pads, wind zones, projectile/lasers to dodge, etc). You could also do some tweaks to the overall movement, right now I find it feels a bit floaty and slow. Upping the movement speed and gravity might make it feel more responsive (but that's quite subjective, take that with a grain of salt).

Like mentioned above the prototype runs pretty poorly as is. I found this really odd since something of that scope should run easily, even with high graphics settings. I dug a little into your scripts and made some minor tweaks which got the game to run smooth (which is what I used to do the playtest). I can send you the file I modified (corridorRotation.cs) if you'd like, but in essense it was just due to how you used Camera.main.
Camera.main makes unity search through ALL objects in the scene until it finds the one with the "MainCamera" tag. It's has heavy performance impacts when used in a script's update function (because it does the search on every frame). To avoid this, you can use it once in the start function (before the game starts playing), assign it to a Camera variable, and then use that variable instead.

[JacobGarneau]

Thank you for the optimization advice! I knew it was weird that it ran so poorly considering how basic it is but I couldn't find what caused it. I just changed it and it looks like it's fixed now!