Addressing Open Beta Feedback (Ian)

About a week ago now, we released the open beta for GRVTY. Since then, we've had twenty playtesters give the game a try and provide us with a great deal of feedback! GRVTY's final release will be coming out by the end of this week and we'll be taking all of that feedback into account as we move towards the game's final version.

There were a handful of issues that players ran into, but the standout issue was far and away that players were confused about what to do and where to go. As Jackson and Noah have mentioned, we all knew that we needed to add more instructions and player direction to the game, but I don't think any of us anticipated just how lacking the game was in that department. I think it's largely because we're so close to the project and we've spent so much time on it that the game feels intuitive to us, but after taking a step back and reading through the playtesters' feedback, it's evident that the game is much less intuitive than we perceived it to be. Something I didn't actually realize until reading through the feedback is that we didn't actually tell the player when they unlocked new mechanics--much less how they work.

With that major issue in mind, we're going to move forward with more player direction being our biggest priority. We're planning on adding dialogue from the perspective of the protagonist that will explain the game's controls and provide hints towards the puzzles that playtesters found the most difficult. Our biggest contributor to increasing the game's clarity will be an NPC robot that will interact with the player in the game's memory scenes, explaining both when the player has unlocked new abilities and how they work. Since my role on the team is largely art-focused, I'll be finding the art assets for the robot and creating the animations that will move it around the memory scenes to guide the player toward their goals. The ending of our game will also involve this robot NPC, with the player reuniting with it after they've escaped the warehouse, so I'll be creating that segment of the level as well. That will hopefully address another major point of feedback, which was that the game lacked a definitive ending to let the player know they've completed all of their objectives.

As far as other visual art-related feedback we received from playtesting, a large number of playtesters liked the visual aesthetic we were going for, which was awesome! The biggest points of critique were that the outdoor portion of the memory scenes was a little dark and hard to see, that the character felt like it may be a little small, and that some colors were very similar and hard to tell apart. The first two were issues I had noticed myself and I intend to address by making a full lighting pass over the level and scaling down the portions of the level that feel too big compared to the player's character. I'll also be sure to make sure that the game's key items stand out from the environment, so they're easier to tell apart.

I'm really excited to see how far we can take GRVTY by the end of this week and I hope you are too!