Feedback from friends – Week 8

This week, I got feedback for my one-page GDD from some of my friends in class and outside.

Group feedback

On Monday I held a group session in which I give a presentation about my game, specifically my game’s one-page GDD, to my classmates who would then provide feedback in the form of flash cards. I will then summarize the key points that were made from the feedback, so I can get a better idea of what I need to do next (I’ve made some text bold to highlight key points).

• 1.
  • Tower defense games are simple and fun. They have a clear progression and a good loop.
  • The narrative needs to be clear. Why should the player stop the robots? Why are they ‘bad’, what do they want?
  • What’s the high risk factor.
• 2.
  • Liked: I like the idea of being able to upgrade rides – it gives the player something to work towards.
  • Improve: Work on developing the rides – what they’ll be & how they’ll work to destroy the robots.
• 3.
  • Liked: I like the idea of buying rides and then upgrading what you’ve already got.
  • Missing: I think the base the robots are attacking should be distinctive in the map – it’s clear where and what it is and maybe there’s a reason why the robots want to go there, e.g. Plants vs Zombies + human brains.
• 4.
  • Something like Mario? -> Attack NPC and gain money and XP.
  • Clear and detailed game loop.
  • Good art style.
  • Like the design of the map.
• 5.
  • Very detailed information of game.
  • Maybe could improve the image of map. It’s hard to know the area of it.
  • Complete very well at level design.
• 6.
  • What you liked:
    • Like the resource system.
    • Like the cartoon style.
  • What’s missing:
    • USP -> Unique Selling Point. What makes it unique?
    • How will the rollercoasters hurt the robots?
• 7.
  • Are money & XP distinct? – Might simplify it.
  • Are there other maps?
  • Good gameplay loop.
• 8.
  • Interesting novel concept.
  • Ride abilitys.
• 9.
  • Sounds like you have a solid idea with lots of different things in which you can explore it.
  • Is this a top-down style game?
  • Are there different types of robots? Styles, powers, etc.
• 10.
  • Use rides to defeat robots sounds interesting.
  • Add an endless mode after pass all levels?

Overall I am happy with the feedback I was given here, as it gave me some areas I could work on to improve. One thing that was mentioned was the narrative, or the story, and I had a story from the first idea I had from this project which I could certainly try to salvage and use here. Another was the game map, and I do agree that it isn’t as distinctive as it could be, so I’ll use this opportunity to make a new map, and to make the perspective clearer, I will make it top down.

Other things that I’ll want to work on is the rides themselves and the robots, the designs of both and how they’ll interact. I do have some ideas from last week’s research, so for example, a merry go round, one idea I had for that was that it spun the robots so quickly it causes them to faint. But this is something I will continue to work on.

Discord feedback

I also started getting feedback from online friends on Discord. This was what they said.

Person 1.

a few things:

• providing a few examples of games that have inspired this gameplay would help me understand what your game will be like
• images of your artstyle inspiration should be provided. you might also want to show some UI inspiration (if you have any)
• I’m not really sure how the robots interact with the rollercoasters – do they just collide with them and take damage? instantly die? or is there some more elaborate interaction?
• are there different types of robots?
• how are levels differentiated from each other, excluding by the number of waves?

I do have some other questions, but they’re a bit more “have you considered doing [X]” rather than “what does [X] mean”

For the last question, I asked them to go ahead and they said:
the big one is: why leave it up to the player to start the next round? if you made it timed, that would put some time pressure on the player and make things more entertaining

I said that ‘It was an idea I got when I was playing a few tower defence games, vector TD and Bloons TD6’

and they responded:

what you’ve designed is much more like Plants vs Zombies
which is timer-based

and Bloons is also timer-based in some modes, iirc

Feedback Summary.

So the main points so far are:

• Group Session
  • Refine map design.
  • Consider Robot and ride design/interaction.
  • Consider gameplay modes.
• Discord
  • Provide reference games.
  • Artstyle/UI Inspiration.
  • Consider robot interaction with rides/robot types/levels.
  • Look into timed play vs leaving the waves up to the player.