First Milestone

Conclusion:

At the end, the players were not that euphoric than I wished them to be, but that was to expect at this early stage. But I gathered up valuable feedback to work with.

Many things weren’t mentioned at all. And as long we are all humans, who mostly addresses only the bad things, I take this as a good sign. But there was one major exception to this: the online functionality. After releasing the hotfix, there were no problems with it at all and because all of my test participants have made bad experience with games directly after their release date or in beta state, they seemed to expected more problems with that.

So far so good, but I would like to continue with the downside:

One of the project goals was to give the players the input adjacent to common standard. And I seemed to miss that goal in two ways. I already wrote about the first one, so I was not surprised. It is about the problem, that the animations while aiming do not follow the mouse input smoothly.

Besides that, the players were not able to define exactly what bothers them about the input, but all of them mentioned it somehow. After reviewing the recorded gameplay of one of them, I saw that he was overwhelmed with the controls. Not in the way, that there were too much of them, but that he got no feedback of the game (“Did I change my weapon?”, “Is there a round in the chamber?”, “Why am I not able to shoot?”, “Did I got hurt?”, and so on). In the whole developing process, I tried to reduce the UI to a minimum, to concentrate the player’s attention to the gameplay, but it seems to be too less of a feedback. Additionally, many of the upcoming UI were represented by a placeholder as a simple string on the screen, which were not clearly communicating with the player. I, as the developer, knew exactly what to look for, but not the player.

The third main criticism was related to the AI. At the beginning of a round, the player was feared, but the longer the session went on, the less remains. For example, the AI blocked themselves at doorways or were not able to reach the players hiding on large obstacles, like a bed. It got even worse when the AI was overwhelmed with judging all the actors (even themselves) if they were hostile or not because later they were passing the players without even noticing them. Especially the last one, I was familiar with, because I recognized that behavior myself in earlier test builds. But I decided to stick with it for the time being because I am planning to replace the Zombies with a different kind of enemy and then there is no need to spawn over fifty of them anymore.

All that directs me to my new goals for the second Milestone:

–       Improving the responsiveness of the input
–       Redesigning the whole feedback
–       Implement the new AI