3D Game Level 2 v1 Feedback
Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be going over the feedback that I received from the playtest on my 3D level 2 project. With this level we continued to work with the Unity engine to create it and we were also given a new theme and goals to work with this time around. Our new theme would now be Medieval and our new goal was to create a level where we can challenge the player leading up to a boss fight. With that being said, I immediately got to brainstorming a couple of different ways to implement our new theme and goals. When I landed on a couple of good ideas, I sketched up an annotated map to visualize it a little better and then I got to work. For the actual playtest we got into groups of 5-6 people in class so that we could get as much feedback as we could.
What went right
This time around with my level 2 project, I honestly had high hopes of creating something good where I could almost picture it being perfect. Unfortunately while there were some areas of my level where I felt things went right there were also a few areas that went wrong in my level. I’ll start with the stuff that went right. During the playtest, almost every player told me that they could clearly see the critical path in front of them and that they did not have any trouble knowing where to go. They also mentioned that the way I structured my level was very cool.
One player really liked how I added some composition to my level to where I could show the player the path ahead or in this case the ending at the very beginning of my level. That was something that I intentionally added to my level so that players could see the finish line without actually knowing how to get there and it turned out to work really well. Another thing that I felt went right in my level was perhaps the interactable's placed inside my level such as the enemies, checkpoints, crystals, switches, doors and breakable cubes. All these things seemed to have been working perfectly during every single playtest and players did not have any problem with them at all.
What went wrong
Moving on to the stuff that went wrong with my level 2, there were perhaps 3 major things that I noticed right away at the very beginning during the first playtest that needed to be addressed. Number 1 was that my level was very short. It did not take my first play tester very long before he could reach the end of my level. Even though I saw him die a couple times, It did not stop him from completing my level faster than I expected. Number 2 would have to be that I underestimated the level of challenge I presented to the players.
I had originally thought that by adding more enemies into my level it would create more of a challenge for the players. What I failed to realize was that I did not increase the health of the enemies. That could have caused the players to more effectively fight them and keep an eye on their own health. Another little side problem that I saw was that I did not add any health boxes to my level at all, which resulted in many of my play testers having to die from enemy damage and then simply just respawn at the checkpoints.
Lastly Number 3, was that I did not implement any boss whatsoever into my level. Originally, I had also thought that we weren’t supposed to create a boss but rather challenge the player leading them into a boss fight. I totally misunderstood that part of our goal for our level 2. Whatever the case may be, I can definitely say that I am going to continue to work hard to improve on these little and big mistakes and prevent them from happening again.
