Peer Feedback 5

The form I put out was to judge whether my game has been a success or not amongst players who tried the final version. This is very useful as I can make use of the feedback in future projects in order to get the best possible games I can. As well as this, the feedback from this form will help in the creation of my evaluation, allowing me to understand what the really important things are to change in my actual game and not just the production phase as I already know what needs to change from that due to experience.

This was quite a general question but the results were pretty much as I expected. Most people seemed to think that the game was quite high quality in terms of graphics, but not perfect. Some people even though that it was middling rather than good or bad, which I think comes from people having different tastes rather than anything I could have done differently.

The interactivity was surprisingly more enjoyed than the graphics of the game. I say surprisingly because I think I could have included a lot more interactivity, with most of it being really simple speaking interactions and doors. In the future I would definitely make sure to include more interactivity to get a higher rating from the players, but I still think that getting mostly 4 stars in terms of interactivity enjoyability is amazing for what I actually had.

This is definitely a but of a shock for me, I can see how there were a few bugs in the game, but I don't understand how people were rating it a 2 star in terms of how robust it was. This clearly shows that I didn't do enough bug testing before releasing the game, and should strive to do more in future projects to ensure the stability of my creations for players or people using them.

Despite overall being an even spread, most people thought the game was around a 3.5 in terms of how high quality it was, with one person putting a 2 star. I can see both viewpoints, the game was really short and lacked a lot of interactivity, but it was graphically quite good and had a decent story to back it up. This is what I think caused most people to even the rating out to a 3 star. To get this higher, I really need to add more interactivity and variety into my game to keep it entertaining. I could also do with adding some sort of audio to keep the atmosphere heavy and the players engaged.

This is a really big success in it's own right, for most people to rate the game as a maybe, and 2 people to rate it as a success, I must have done a brilliant job. The main thing to take from this is that people put maybe but not a no. This means that the failures of the game were all outweighed by the successes of the game, meaning that it was overall quite positive! I was obviously aiming for full yes's, but this is almost as good of a result.

Some people clarified really well, saying that the game was full of bugs or that the concept is really interesting. This is useful information as it backs up what I already knew about my game, that the bugs were really letting the project down. I will definitely have to work on this in the future, making sure to give myself time to actually go through the game and iron out all of the potential bugs before they even happen or affect the player experience. This would be really helpful in taking my game to the next level as having so many noticable bugs can ruin the amount of enjoyment people get from projects like this one, especially when such a short game should be nearly perfectly bugless since things are difficult to miss and seem intentionally missed.

Most people didn't even mind the bugs the most out of everything, mostly disliking the length of the game rather than its stability. This is interesting as up until this point I figured that the bugs were the main cause of the generally poor ratings from players.

I do get what the players mean with the length of the game, it just doesn't last long enough. This is both an issue with the initial story being too simple, short and not very fleshed out as well as the deadline being so close when I started production. If I had planned my time for efficiently I probably would have been able to make a much longer game, avoiding this issue completely. Time management to check for bugs and make a longer game is definitely something I should be looking into for future projects.

Just as I said before, the game was just too short to really enjoy and the players had to deal with a decent amount of bugs. Unfortunately this couldn't really be helped because of how little time I actually had to work on the game as well as the amount of jobs that I was doing for it.

Most people seemed to agree with me in terms of the game looking relatively high quality, though only one person wanted to say it outright. The key part here is that noone really disliked the quality of the game enough to outright say that it doesn't have any sense of quality to it. This means that the game was generally quite high quality rather than low quality, meaning I did a good job for the amount of time I had. I could probably improve this by having more varied animations in future projects, as well as more detailed sprites.

I get that people are comparing the game to other pixel games, but the black border answer makes very little sense. This is because the void was always meant to be part of the game so that the UI text would be visible with a decent enough amount of contrast to be readable. I suppose I could always find out how to make text readable without the black void at the bottom if it really bothers players, but the void and the stray pixels are things that I don't really understand. I didn't notice any stray pixels during production, and definitely didn't see the animations as less smooth than other games. I do admire the praise the game got for the detail and the visual art direction as a lot of time was put into it.