Week 5: Sharing the Fun

Hello again, readers! This week, our team had the pleasure of informally testing the game and receiving feedback from our TA.

Informal Testing With Family 🎮

Due to the fact that Kris has enough siblings to test Double Dare Derby with a full party, he was responsible for getting an outside opinion of the game and find any hidden bugs. 

We'll begin with the bugs:

• Each round, a random player would be unable to collect gems.
• The physics were too floaty and caused players to reach ridiculous heights.
• Ramming into players who don't have the crown would crown the attacking player.
• On a new round, gems would not respawn.
• Adrenaline would not reset on a new round.
• Player positions would not reset on a new round.
• The falling animation would trigger too late.

Keep your hopes up! Here are the good findings:

• Lots of laughter and excitement.
• The level allows players to cut each other off and take alternate paths.
• We confirmed that the game needed a minimap.

Additionally, Kris and the testers played two versions of the game, a version with a fixed camera and a version with an automatic moving camera, to see what direction the team should develop towards.

The testers were told to focus on how the camera feels, but they were not told what was different between the builds. They began with the automatic camera first, and played multiple rounds to get a feel for the game. Upon switching to the fixed camera they expressed their discomfort. To ensure that this wasn't a biased opinion due to testing the automatic camera first, the testers switched to the other build after playing multiple rounds with the fixed camera.

Going back to play the first build gave confidence to the answer. The automatic camera allowed the players to focus on their movement rather than the direction the camera was pointing. There were only brief moments where players moved the camera to correct it. In contrast, players always have to move the camera when it was fixed and the sensitivity was too high.

TA Feedback 📝

Due to our meeting being remote, our team used Parsec to allow our local multiplayer game to work online. As we played, we updated our TA with the changes we have made since submitting our game design document. He gave us 2 main pieces of feedback:

Expanding the Level

Part of the fun of Double Dare Derby is smoothly soaring through the streets at high speeds, and the level should accommodate for that. The level would benefit from being larger and "looping" into itself.

As you can see from the image above, the roads stop abruptly at the edge of the map. Players would look to the roads to see what directions they can travel, which makes it awkward when they reach a dead end when they're supposed to be moving constantly. If these roads naturally branched off and merged back together, the player would have a clearer idea of where they can go to escape or cut someone off.

Additionally, the packed city environment has potential for some rooftop action. There are many flat surfaces created by the tops of buildings that could be used to create interesting movement tactics and dimension to the level.

Power ups

An issue that the team had not thought of was the potential skill gap between players. How can someone in last place catch up? The answer that Mario Kart gave was items; players low on the leaderboard would gain higher value items that level the playing field while also inciting chaos. We love chaos and fairness, so we will be rapidly prototyping this new feature.

We are almost at the halfway point of this project! Thank you for reading this week's devlog 😊