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Yoh / PlaytestReviewsDeadEndsFrom the professor: Foremost: congratulations on pulling off a playable game. You have created a complete FPS and gotten it all together in a limited time. 1. The Idea: I'm still a little skeptical of the idea of this basically being a pure twitch game and holding ones attention. There are certainly ideas emerging that move beyond this, but they didn't quite make it into the playtest. 2. The Promise: Its already showing elements of being fun, and if you could get beyond it just being a twitch game, the mechanics are solid enough that it could be really cool. 3. Current State: Its totally playable. It could use some tuning, and some ways to make it more interesting than just run and shoot everything. 4. Experience: With instructions in place, and such a tried-and-true mechanic, its easy to sit down and play. 5. Implementation: Seems solid 6. Good and Bad Good: its a fast shooter. Its fun for a couple of minutes. Bad: its very simple - while there are elements where you can play it in more interesting ways that just "run towards the dot and shoot as fast as you can", its not clear how much that's just emerging, or getting any encouragement to do it. In many ways, this is like a circa-1993, first generation shooter game. Except that there, the visuals (and enemies) had more variety. I think what's really missing is to find ways to making it a more interesting experience. 7. What should be fixed/added: Some way of encouraging/rewarding the player to use strategy rather than just running straight to the goal and shooting everything. Basically, giving the player meaningful choices. Some more variety (visually, mechanistically, ...). Some way of making it a longer experience (and/or giving it replay value where you can feel progress between times that you play) From the TA: In the limited time, I was very impressed to see you pull together a first person shooter. Nicely done. :) [promise] Given more time to polish, you could make a few improvements that would really up the interestingness and strategic components of the game. [current state] Right now, the game contains very little complexity. You can run around like a madman, using your gun in tight situations, racing towards your goal. [game experience] Pretty easy to figure out everything. [implementation] Stable. Mostly complete. [good/bad] Good: It's a solid shooter game. Bad: Not enough complexity, strategy, etc. [if you had more time...] If you had a lot more time, there are a few things that would improve your game significantly. 1.) Weapon balance (machine gun more powerful). 2.) Shooting makes zombies get knocked back **OR** Shotguns do instant kills at very close range (to help in swarm situations). 3.) Other ways to stop or slow down zombies (traps, sealed door, etc). 4.) Area of effect weapons for desperate situations (grenades). 5.) Slightly more visible minimap (to allow better planning). From your classmates: The idea is pretty simple. You are in a maze, and you must go from point A to B, and end in C before you die. To help you in your goal, you have a small array of weapons to fight off the zombies which do not want you to win. It could be a fun game if there was some other aspect to it. The idea that every level is random kind of detracts from the social aspect of the game: so one person beat the game on the most difficult setting, but the level and placement of zombies for player X and player Y are completely different every time, so there is little basis for actual comparison. Also a minor story, or even progression, would probably help the game in terms of re-playability. The game looked pretty good, ran well, and seemed pretty tight. It may be good to play a few times, but after that, in its current state, I wouldn’t have too much reason to play it a lot. The instructions were good, the only thing that lacked was the purpose of the game. When I got in, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I would have thought it to be kill every zombie, but that definitely was not the case. An extra screen describing what to do would be nice. I only had to ask what the green beacons were for, other than that I knew what to do. The game did not crash, and seemed to run at a decent fps even with a large amount going on. It was put together really well and ran accordingly. Good thing about the game was that each weapon kind of had a different purpose. The machine gun was to keep guys at bay, and the shotgun was to kill them. The bad thing about it was there were only 2 weapons, and at the hard difficulties, killing zombies was not even possible. The game turned into a running around from room to room as quickly as possible. There should be a way to increase the difficulty to a point where you don’t have to avoid the main game mechanic to win. That’s what I had to do when I tried the harder settings. There should be some progression to the game if possible. This would mean a few levels would have to be generated, and then people could play them and have experiences which could be compared. Possibly some type of scoring would be nice, or a timer which added another constraint to the player. Playing with a timer to complete the level could also be seen as a way to increase difficulty, and scoring could be based on this. 1. The game idea seems unchanged since near the start of the project. I see two main parts of the idea: A maze game, and procedural generated levels. The maze game idea seems like a fairly standard game. Procedurally generating content I think is a very hard challenge but not insurmountable. 2. I think with more time the procedural generation could be extended to create more interesting types of levels. This is something I would very much like to see, and I think with enough tuning of the system. It could create very addicting levels. 3. I think the current state of the game is a good short game. However, I don't feel its replay value is very high. I think once you've beaten a difficulty once or twice your done with it. This is an under utilization of the procedurally generated levels. I think the game could easily work with a few static static levels. I think a simple way to improve this is to add more goals. 4. Overall instructions were good and controls were intuitive. I personally missed the fact the green orb lead to my current goal. 5. Implementation was fairly solid. I believed it crashed once. The game also has to be restarted to change the level of difficulty. 6. I think the guns are underpowered. Most of the current game play is based on moving around the zombies. I think an easy way to change this is make the guns push the zombies back. I think the sounds and the graphics of great quality given the development time and resources. 7. I think adding more strategy would be a good bet. Allowing people to move the zombies in other ways. Allowing you to throw something to draw the zombies attention away for a short period of time. Allowing you guns the ability to push zombies back. I think the second thing I would add is progression of difficulty so every time you play you feel like you've accomplished something more. The general idea of the game is pretty simple: a first person shooter where you are swarmed by a lot of zombies. In the current state the game is pretty awesome, and in some regards reminds me of the days of wolfenstein. I like the sound effects, they add a lot of ambiance to it. Since the controls are pretty much standard fps, the control scheme was very easy to understand. Since the goal was put on the map, i could find it easier. Someway to get out of being trapped in corners would be great. Like grenades, or a chainsaw, or something. The character moves a little too fast right now, fast enough that he can easily avoid all zombies if he looks at the minimap. If you get time, some variation in zombies would be nice. Like fast zombies that died when you shot them once with the weakest weapon, but you need to shoot because they are almost as fast as you. And also some zombie flocking, so they flank you more and do not get too close to one another. Dead Ends is built upon tried-and-true FPS mechanics, which gives it a solid basic gameplay mechanic to build on. One major difference is the focus on enemy avoidance. Most FPSes tend to somewhat more focused on destroying a good portion of the enemies than avoiding them. Taking this focus means that the design has to strike a careful balance between killing/evading. It might make for a confusing player experience if he/she has capabilities that are never used. The FPS mechanic is a proven fun one. If the team continues to develop the FPS mechanic of Dead Ends, it will definitely be a fun game. However, since the FPS mechanic exists in so many games, it would take a lot of work to make Dead Ends truly stand out. I think the current version of the game has all of the necessary basics. It is difficult to comment on how difficult the game was to figure out, since it makes use of standard controls (rightly so) that I've been familiar with for years. The gameplay implementation was very solid. It crashed once, but everyone's game crashed once. There was nothing in particular that I had to overlook to play the game. I can think of two things that the game needs the most: variation in the appearance of rooms, and faster killing speed. All in all I was very impressed with the implementation of Dead Ends. It is very clear that a lot of work went into the technical detail behind the game and it pays off. It was very easy to sit down and start playing - the instruction screen was useful and the controls are well understood by anyone who has gamed before. At its current state, Dead Ends is an enjoyable diversion. During playtesting I was able to beat it on all three difficulty settings - especially enjoying the Hard setting where I stopped even trying to kill zombies and instead made a run for it. My concern is that although fun for 15 minutes or so, the game has little lasting draw. The challenge is very straightforward and an inexperience player can master it quickly. Once he has done so, the game has less interest. I feel that this could be fixed in a few different ways. One would be to make a greater challenge out of the 'maze' aspect of the game. The green dots are useful, and it would be awfull y frustrating to not have any idea where you are going, but some way of forcing the player to work for them ("first activate the navigation system, then follow the dots to your dog") or think about which to follow could force the player to invest more thought and care into the game. Another way to increase interest would be some variance to enemies or weapons. Faster moving zombies or slow, range attack monsters could be interesting and make the player focus on target selection. Weapons with area of effect could help prevent the 'damn I'm stuck in a mob of zombies and will die no matter what' scenario. It could also be cool to have some portions of the environment that the player can use to defeat zombies. Explosive barrels are the classic example of this. Also, some sort of progression could give the player a better feeling of accomplishment. You could still employ the random levels, but simply add a new enemy or weapon or something each level. With the remaining ti me, I'm sure you guys can find some neat features to spice up gameplay. I think focusing on that will really make this game shine. A quick technical note: The game crashed a few times on me - it seemed to be related to attacking zombies with different weapons (shooting with machine gun, switch to shotgun, fire a couple of rounds : crash) Obviously I don't know if this is actually the case, but it struck me as one consistent element in the crashes. 1. Idea: I like the game's general premise. Shooting zombies and saving dogs sounds great. 2. Promise: I feel like this game would be very fun with more time. Adding more content and improved specific part shooting (aka head shots) will really increase the fun of the game. 3. Current State: I like the game and had fun playing it. I don't know if the game was designed this way, but I felt I like I could beat the game without firing a shot (except maybe in hard mode). 4. Experience: The instructions provided were good. The only thing I can remember asking about were the green bubble thingys. 5. Implementation: the implementation seemed solid. There was only one hiccup where I played a new game and my character started shooting right away. 6. Good/Bad: I liked shooting zombies and the zombies chasing me added a lot of tension. I didn't quite understand the dog's head on the screen part. Was I riding the dog? Or did I become the dog? crazy.... 7. Fix/ADD: Adding other zombies/enemies that don't take the exact path as the zombies would be awesome and would surprise that player. Making an enemies use a ranged weapon would also create complexity. Adding a grenade or melee weapon would cool. Having the reload time be a function of amount of shells to reload would be great. That threw me off at first. Maybe having multi-layered levels would increase the playtime. |