This first question was quite an obvious one, I simply asked in the questionnaire whether the person answering played our game or not. The 20 people that answered the questionnaire all had played cosmic constructor so I had no doubt when it came to legitimacy of the answers of the next questions asked. It was a basic question that needed answering first before I could move on.
Next question I asked is for how long they have played our game for. And since our game isn't really that long, instead of putting stamps in hours played I instead put in minutes played. This question was made so that I knew for how long a typical player would play our game in it's current state and therefore knew how much content there was for a player to enjoy before he gets bored of it and quits. This is a very good question to ask since if there isn't a lot of playtime being had then you know that you have to add more content to the game. Overall, most people played it in between 10 to 20 minutes which gives me a rough idea that the game is quite short and needs a lot more work and content patching in order to be up to a standard.
The next question I asked was if the player enjoyed the game. Now the answers were varied here and it shows us that we have a lot to work on in terms of how the game is supposed to look. 65% of people said that they enjoyed the game while 35% said that they did not. This question was just a beginning of a series of questions that would explore why the person did not like the game. Overall however this is a pretty important indicator that there is something that is wrong within the game that is making people upset.
This next question relates to Question 3, but asks what the player liked about Cosmic Constructor (if applies) in detail. There were many answers here (captured across 3 screenshots). A lot of people liked the enemies, their variety and AI, some people like the module design as well as the levels, and not a lot of people but still some liked how the game looks and sounds. Overall, there is a healthy doze of answers to analyze here, we clearly did a very good job on the enemies as well as level and module design, the art side is also quite good. Overall, these answers correlate to our goals and what we have been focusing on throughout development so we're happy overall.
This question still relates to Question 3 but instead it asks the players what they did not like about our game. To summarize, some people complained about how the game looks and sounds, others complained about the levels, 1 or 2 people complained about the module system. But most of the answers were relating to the difficulty of the game, which in turn can be attributed why some people said other things, since the game difficulty might have made them angry while answering this questionnaire. Overall however, it is the difficulty that angered the most people while playing our game, which is both good and bad. Good because we have reached our goal of creating a game that requires skill and precision to beat, bad because we're losing potential customers due to it's difficulty. I feel like to make everyone happy we should add an option to decrease difficulty or have the game decrease difficulty overtime if the player keeps dying. This way we could still keep the competitive players happy and also make the casual players happy.
This was another question asked by us to check how the replay-ability of the game is holding up. Overall, 10 people said that the game has enough content to last for 30+ minute while the other 10 said no, this gives us a clear indication that there is enough content for it to be argued about but definitely not enough content to make everyone happy. In the future therefore we should strive to create more content before having the game be seen or create mechanics that increase replay-ability.
This was a question asking about the game's difficulty, since part of our plan was to have this game have a skill requirement to be good at and not keep dying over and over we wanted to ask this question to see how the players felt about the overall difficulty level. Correlating to the results from question 5 we can see that most of people find this game extremely hard. This just proves the theory that in the future we will need to adjust the difficulty or give an option for the player to adjust it himself.
The next question that we asked was simply out of curiosity, but it also allowed us to measure our game to professional products that actually make it out of development and sell. We wanted to ask the participants of the questionnaire how much (if any) amount they would pay for Cosmic Constructor if it were to be developed into a fully fledged indie game. The answers focused on two points here, slightly more people were in the opinion that the game, if released, should be free, while 9 people said that they would pay somewhere in between of 1 to 6 pounds for this game. Overall, we feel like this answer is sufficient, since there wasn't that much content in the game since it's really just a prototype a lot of people might have missed the part of the question saying - "A fully blown indie game" which is understandable, and thus the reason why they might have picked free. Overall however we're happy with the responses.
Then we asked if the participants would recommend our game to somebody else. Most of them said that they would while 7 said that they wouldn't. This is completely understandable from our points of view, our game has flaws that were pointed out earlier, such as the difficulty system or the lack of a lot of content. And therefore some people might not like it. We also think it is because some people just don't like certain things and therefore they will not recommend it no matter what we change, people have their personal preferences after all.
Last question in our questionnaire was another comment box asking the participants of the survey what they would like to see changed within Cosmic Constructor, allowing us to, instead of guessing, actually be told the next steps in development. There were all sorts of suggestions here and I'll try my best to summarize them. A lot of the answers simply said - "Lower the difficulty" or "Allow us to change difficulty", we already knew that from analyzing the previous questions but nonetheless it is good for the player to tell us directly. Other answers included changes to art style, having it more sophisticated, better sound design, addition of things like more content or boss battles. One person even suggested an even better AI. Overall we're pretty happy with the responses and we have a clear direction for any future developments.
Evaluation:
Over the past few months of developing our game, it underwent a lot of changes, some more drastic than the others, as we learned more about the engine we worked with as well as developed our ideas. Change was necessary. Eventually we have completed the game to a standard that we were happy with. The game is a 2D vertical space shooter with an interesting module mechanics that allows the player to modify their ship to their liking and how they play. The game features quite a lot of enemies, each with a unique way of behavior, health, damage and reward. It features levels that are laid out with traps and turrets waiting to pounce on the player at any moment. As mentioned above the game also features a module system which allows the player to attach additional things to his ship to create new ways to play as well as to adjust to his play style. The game also features a very skill based gameplay, one wrong move can lead to your death and the game will be reset. The game itself features a lot of high definition backgrounds as well as high quality 128x128 pixel art, on top of that we have made some music and sound effects as well. Over the time of development I feel like the game really did take a lot of big steps.
As said, we have developed a lot of our skills over the course of this development, this being our first game I am quite proud to say that it was a success. Not only that but it also met the requirements that we have put forth in our pitch, meaning that we have not went out of scope with the projects and kept realistic about it. A lot of new experiences were had in this project, while I usually do level design, this time I was put in charge of doing all the programming. This meant learning something that I never touched before. Trying to program was and still is a wild experience for me, I am constantly learning new things, and I had to change a lot of things throughout the development due to simply learning how to do something better or differently as is shown in my production log, this meant losing time on things that usually wouldn't happen if I had some sort of experience. Some things also took a lot of effort to actually code, such as the module system. Luckily, some help was available through online forums and tutorials so I wasn't completely stuck. I also improved other skills, such as communication and teamwork with my partner - Taylor, as well as developed good planning and time keeping habits.
When I review this project, especially the beginnings and how we thought the game is going to look, even when presenting it in a pitch, I can honestly say that in the end we are not far from the expectations we had, which makes me proud to say that we successfully managed to keep the scope of the game realistic to our abilities, as well as plan and time manage well within the team. The things that we planned to implement, we implemented, and thus we managed to create a semi-professional indie game with some flaws, but overall a very good quality for our first proper game ever. We created everything we had hoped for, the module system, enemy variety, traps, levels etc. There was of course more things that we would have loved to add, such as a more varied gameplay with more objectives, a quest and story line or boss battles, unfortunately we have ran out of time before we were able to meet these extra goals, nevertheless however they were just extra.
Our problem solving skills were at a high level in my opinion, we were able to identify issues quickly, research into them and eliminate them, as well as plan ahead to avoid problems altogether. We would often spend extra time outside of lessons to figure stuff out as well as do additional documentation or research. We had a schedule for everything and I feel like we managed our time correctly and well. Nonetheless, we took the development at our own pace and felt like it benefited us greatly in the end. We also kept a solid log of progress to make sure that everything is buttoned up and progressing as it should be.
In terms of target audience I feel like we did our best to successfully target the game at them, which are teenagers and young adults alike. Our game is a skill based space shooter which according to our research done before is what appeals to them, in a young age, humans tend to be very competitive so a game requiring skill but being fun at the same time really did hit the nail on it's head. Overall however, from the survey we did we found out that the game is indeed appealing and fun for the people playing so it seems like we have managed to reach the goal we aimed for. There were of course criticisms posted about the game but we're completely fine with that, there is always something to be improved. As long as it's constructive, it's great.
In terms of our game, I really liked how it all turned out, I feel like the enemies fit the art style together, there is a lot of modules and all of them fit together nicely, the player model fits with the world and the levels are well done with a lot of things to battle within them. There is always room for improvement however, and from what we heard in terms of feedback, our most important thing to work on is to give players a choice, a choice for the difficulty of the game, a choice for what enemies they want and do not want. I feel that this would make our game infinitely better and would get rid of most complaints we had about the current state of the game.
If I were to do this project again, there would be a lot of things that I would change most definitely. This project was me mostly exploring new things and learning programming as a beginner, I can now safely say that I got a lot more experience under my belt and can easily use my experience to avoid problematic situations as well as work in a quicker and more efficient pace. For starters, I would definitely create a more detailed plan for each day, and try to keep up with it. I would also start out my programming tasks with first organizing how I want to program it all, a big part of this project was me having to re-organize everything within the code to have a grip of what's going on which took a lot of time and effort. I would also improve on various elements in the game, such as the art style to look much better and for the sound effects to be far more professional and sound more. I would also try to improve on the module design, adding more modules, more variety and generally have it impact the game more, open more play styles for the players. I would also try to improve on the AI to make it even more impressive over time. Overall however I am pretty happy with how this project went.
Overall, I am happy with how this project has turned out, I feel like I have learned a lot of things but I still have a lot more to learn, nonetheless I shall continue progressing with a steady pace. I am especially happy about the end result of this project, we got a good game going with a lot of good documentation and assets done and we have showcased that we can do projects well without going out of scope or running out of time.
