2011 Spring Semester Playtest Session 6

You have to hold down a button and flick a joystick to flip the car over, would you know that without a tutorial?

From this playtest we received a resounding need for a tutorial. So we've created one and will be testing it today actually. Now the tutorial was not created specifically because of the playtesting incident; we have known that the game has been screaming for a tutorial for quite some time now. We just haven't had time to do it until after our Beta milestone. So one of our goals for our Gold milestone is to have the tutorial for the game and to update our menus. That is it unless we find time to do other stuff like updating the HUD or getting the trick system fully integrated into the game experience. Even though we're not looking to do more than what was mentioned above I can still think of things that need to change and the team can work on them over the summer as our game is going beyond our junior semester. Some things that I noticed during playtesting is that we still need sensitivity settings for the car controls, this goes for flying and ground controls. Some players seem fine with the controls while others are having trouble keeping the car straight. This is more for flying than the ground controls though. The obstacles in the level that testers were in also seemed a bit tight for them. They didn't have enough time to react before they crashed into the barrier or whatever they were crashing into. To mitigate this I'm beginning to test levels by counting to a second or two before I react to give a sense of a player not knowing what is going to happen next. I should also keep in mind that the level that testers were in was one of the later levels. I also noticed that dieing takes too long when the car flies off the road. This is partly because

Having a system that would rotate the car when the player is not pressing any buttons would be a good system to have for player empowerment

of our wing mechanic, but it is also because of our static kill plane that is a good distance below the road. There are a lot of ways we could fix this, but I believe it will deal with us getting a spline or some sort of system that follows the track to determine when the car is off the track. We will more than likely use this system to setup logic for rotating the car to land on the road. This system will empower the player as it makes them feel more badass since they are not crashing as often. Once this system is implemented it will be very useful for making the game feel better to players and making it easier to setup logic that deals with the track and the car. That is it for this playtest, everything else is just small things. I'll keep you updated on anything else that occurs with the game. Thanks for reading.