2011 Spring Semester Playtest Session 2

Playtesters are still receiving the game well. They had a lot of feedback for us this time, and some of it was issues that were not fully apparent to us, such as players not seeing where they are going to land when flying. This became very apparent when players were going off of huge drops offs and having no idea what is under them. Another issue that still needs to change is the warning for the heat meter when it fills up. It needs to be more apparent.

Camera issue in action. notice how there is no telling what's under you, if anything

Basically, there needs to be a hard hitting visual cue that pulls the player out of their focus of playing the game so they notice the meter. There are a ton of ways to get that visual cue, such as having the screen flash red, and changing the UI to get the players attention. We are current pursuing both avenues, and will hopefully have it up before our alpha presentation which is in the second week of February.

Other issues were that players really wanted the car to be able to drift. We've been receiving this feedback for a while now, and we hope to get it into the game at a later date.

One thing that has been surprising is that a dev car ability has become apart of the game. Previously we thought that it was just going to be something that devs would use until we found another solution, but it seems to be working very well. The dev car ability is simply allowing the car to do a barrel roll if the left or right bumper are hit on an Xbox 360 controller. This ability is infinite for now, meaning that one of the bumpers can be held and the car will continue to do barrel rolls until the button is released. This ability helps with flipping the car over if it ends up on its top.

Dev car ability in action, the car is grinding into the ground and thus receiving better "traction" to get around the turns

Playtesters also mentioned that the car should have more control when it slows down. Currently, players have less control over the car when it slows down. This has something to do with the physics in the game, and our physics programmer will start to work on this issue as soon as possible.

Another issue with the game is the level pieces. Currently, there are zero transition pieces between different types of road, such as half pipes and normal road pieces. This is an issue because visually the game looks unfinished, and players have a tendency to crash into areas where if there were transition pieces they would never crash into those areas.

Now that I've spoken of the issues in our game, here's some feedback that players said that was good about our game. Even though playtesters found the flying to be frustrating many said that "Flying is really cool". Many also felt that it was an integral part of the game.

Some of the playtesters gave us some great ideas to play around with as well, such as having the car's wings get brighter as the car moved faster, or have the booster doors pop open instead of slowly open to get the player's attention. Also, players wanted the car to do barrel rolls more quickly while it was in the air, more like how the car can barrel roll without the wings.