v0.13 Playtest Results

Playtest Results

In the past two days, I've ran a few playtests of Ride of the Time Bed 2. One playtest was a longer one of about 10 runs, the others were generally shorter sessions of one to five runs. Thank you to everyone who participated! The playtests were relatively informal, with mostly me observing and asking some questions, so the results are mostly my observations and not really hard data. Hard data would help, and I hope to gather some of it later if I have the time, but this is far better than nothing. All tests were performed using a gamepad.

I took the following conclusions from the tests

• The game was fun/engaging enough for several people to voluntarily play multiple runs and try to do better. Happy Mana noises.
• The highscore system encouraged people to try and beat their friends, and had players challenge others to beat their scores. This is very much an intended experience!
• The controls received no negative comments, which I take to mean they work well enough. A couple of testers commented on the octagonal aiming/shooting, but also said it encouraged better positioning and was more a thing to get used to than something bad
• The visual effects/post-processing, and the audio were well received, and invoked the feel of "retro/arcade" that I am going for.
• That being said, the bed is not recognizable as a bed. This needs to be fixed. Enemies might also need a little bit more distinction.
• Most people didn't notice that orange and red enemies had different effects (draining fuel vs taking a life). Although this is subideal, I'm putting it low on the priority list, because it doesn't affect gameplay all that much, in the end the goal is still to dodge them.
• Power-ups were recognized as such, although their exact effect/timing wasn't always clear. I'm okay with this being something a player has to learn through repeated runs or possibly reading the manual
• However, from both my own playing and observing the playtests, the duration of Rapid Fire and Piercing Shots is a little too short
• It is not entirely clear that there's several stages of slowing/speeding up time. Especially completely stopping time was a mechanic not really discovered. 
• Even more glaringly, players generally didn't get that they could use speeding up time to regain fuel. As this is an essential core game mechanic, this either requires UI improvements, or to be part of the tutorial
• Generally though, people were perfectly capable of playing and enjoying the game with just the controls explained to them.
• Nobody commented on this, but from my observation the difficulty of the early game should be lowered a little bit. Only one tester reached the boss fight (and got quite far into defeating it on their second try). People also didn't really get moments of rest as much as I would like.
• The text "wave x completed" is confusing, since it would pop up when enemies were still in the screen. I saw this coming then forgot about it. 
• The Gamepad and the UI don't work together yet. The Play again button has a wonky collider.

I'm quite happy with these results, especially with how engaged people were with the game, dragged others into the playtest, and tried to beat each other's scores. The experience of players was pretty much what it was intended to be. The major problems I have observed are communicating the fuel mechanic and time controls. Since I don't really have the time or resources to improve/test/improve/test/improve the UI until it works, I'm going to include this information into the tutorial.

What's Next?

So what are the next steps of the project? What I would like to do is spend another two weeks improving this. Unfortunately, I have gotten confirmation that this project has a (soft) deadline, and I'm running out of time for Ride of the Time Bed, especially with how ambitious the Arcade part of the game has become. These are the planned upcoming steps:

• Add an interactive tutorial to Time Bed. This should fix the major issues of the fuel mechanic and having to explain the controls
• Slightly decrease the difficulty of the early game and slightly increase power-up time
• Make a sprite for the player so it's more clear it's a bed
• Make the gamepad control the UI correctly
• Move on to making a functional/first version of the Arcade/Main Menu

I hope to return to Time Bed before the end of the project, and add more enemies and potential bosses, but for now I have to acknowledge that that is lower priority than having a minimal version of the other games and menu in place.