Testing Devlog

Hello and for the last time welcome back to my Devlog series. For the last installment we will discuss how the game has changed after a testing session. During the session people played the game and answered questions on a feedback form to suggest improvements and highlights aspects they liked/disliked about the game. 

A large portion of the feedback consisted of recommendations/comments regarding the player movement. 

"being able to move on a diagonal/8 directions, a dash of some kind could also add some fun for avoiding incoming knights."
"Currently cannot continue in the direction you are holding if you tap another key. For example, if you're holding D, then want to move slightly up, so without letting go of D you tap W, once you stop pressing W, your character does not revert to going right even though you are still holding D."

Due to time restrictions I only decided to implement the movement smoothing to allow for a more natural user control. To accomplish this I stored all of the directions taken in a list and set the players velocity to the most recent, then when a key is released the corresponding directions is removed from the list of taken directions.

The size of the maze is something I've been worried about for some time now as I feel it could become monotonous to traverse or could make the game feel to difficult.  

"Size of the map in combination with the character's move speed made the game feel somewhat tedious."

40% of testers agreed the map was too big while a majority 60% believed it too be a good size. With this in mind I decided to decrease the size as I feel doing so wont discourage those who feel the map is a good size but will make the game more enjoyable for those that feel the maze is too big. 

---------------Map before(25x25)---------------

---------------Map after(19x19)---------------

The game testers also picked up on a few bugs in the game.

"The cat path-finds to the player's square but doesn't path-find to the player afterwards, allowing the player to stand at the side of the tile and avoid the cat entirely."

I didn't implement pathfinding like this as it shouldn't be necessary due to the width of the hallways and Clawdius' grid pathfinding making it impossible for the player and Clawdius to not overlap when on the same tile. However, I had forgotten that I had made the entities colliders only cover their feet to create the effect of walking behind or in front of a wall. To fix this I changed Clawdius' hitbox to encapsulate his entire body as his pathfinding constricts him to the center of hallways anyways and added a hitbox trigger to the player that also encapsulates they're entire body.

A similar bug was found with the armor statues. 

"You can currently dodge the knights to a degree. If it's a horizontal moving knight, walking into the lower wall will allow you to dodge, but the upper wall won't. If its a vertical moving knight, walking to the right wall will allow you to dodge, but walking to the left won't."

This bug was occurring for the same reason as the bug previously discussed with Clawdius so I was able to fix it in a very similar manner.

Now forget everything discussed so far because we are about to get into the greatest and most game changing suggestion to improve the game of all time.

"a way to stun the cat" 

This particular tester originally suggested adding an item such as catnip to stun Clawdius however upon hearing this I made a strong rebuttal.

"uuuuuhm yeah no I cant be bothered anymore"

Then once again the tester came through as they suggested.

"why don't you just make the armor stun the cat like they stun the player"

And just like that the best mechanic in the game was born. This addition makes the game easier while adding a level of skill. It also makes avoiding the armor become less of a chore as pointed out by a tester. 

 The guards, while a nice obstacle (especially while getting chased), adds to the tediousness when otherwise traversing the map.

And now for my final addition to the game. As recommended by another tester, a game over screen.

"I think a game over/death screen could be a fun addition."

To implement this I made it so the scene gets paused upon the player getting caught if they haven't achieved the high score. Text then becomes visible that displays the players score for their run along with buttons to play again and return to the main menu.

Thank you for coming along for the ride :)