Devlog 6: Game Testing (17/10 - 23/10)

This week was spent completing an assortment of tasks based on feedback from testing.

TL;DR: Interpreted testing results from last week, and found things needed balancing, so things were balanced this week. Also, a lightning Spell was made.

Chapters

1. Testing
2. You've been hit by, you've been struck by, Invoke Lightnin' bolt
3. IT'S ALIVE!
4. The Balancing Act
   1. Dark Sickle Spell
   2. Arcane Seeker Spell
   3. Scratch "Spell"
5. Known Bugs & Issues

Testing

At the tail end of week 5, feedback on Wizard Colosseum was collected from a small audience. Most particpants conveniently had minimal prior interaction with the game and its surrounding material, which would have made initial reactions and opinions more authentic (though many testers were friends and family, so there were probably other biases too 😐). Here were some key takeaways:

• Most testers (around 75%) indicated that they had at least some experience in games that share genres with Wizard Colosseum
• The group was roughly evenly split between rating the game as easy or adequately difficult (~45%:50%), though some did find it too difficult (~5%)
• When provided with limited votes on possible future features, testers indicated that they they were most interested in seeing bosses (~80%), items for healing and other functions (~65%), and difficulty settings (~60%)
• Most testers (~75%) both described in text and indicated using the monstrous checkbox table (sorry 😞), that they found the Dark Sickle Spell too strong, while the other Spells were too weak or situational in comparison
• Most testers would exclusively use Dark Sickle due to this power discrepancy
• The average tester high-score was above 60 kills (which takes 5+ minutes)

These results support an interpretion where most testers were reasonably engaged playing this game, but also yearned for further challenges to suit their skills.

You've been hit by, you've been struck by, Invoke Lightnin' bolt

This week the player was given another Spell, this one grants them the power of Zeus at their fingertips! Invoke Lightning reused Traits from Scratch to be made in a more timely manner (though there are likely new bugs 'n' stuff).

The Texture for this Spell was run through a ShaderGraph to give it a more interesting appearance. This will be standard practice in the future (as it looks really cool), though it does take additional time to implement. The ShaderGraph had some minor hiccups when multiple were overlapped and when it was placed on an icon on the hotbar, but these were rectified wuth reasonable ease.

IT'S ALIVE!

Some testers noticed the lack of proper pathfinding on BehaviourCreatures could lead to enemies repeatedly ramming into terrain. The source of this issue was found and rectified (it was a bad Physics Raycast), and now enemies often take smarter movement choices to approach the player. Additional work is required to prevent enemies movements into disadvantageous positions, as now they can bounce between two tiles indefintely. This change did not affect the fleeing behaviour of liches.

The Balancing Act

Most testers brought up the poor balance between the different Spells available to the player, and even more implied these concerns during their casual play. Much of this scrutiny came from the strengths of the Dark Sickle Spell and the weaknesses of the other Spells, which often lead to very uninteresting gameplay. Below are the balance changes for version 6.0, though these will likely be in their own seperate devlogs in the future.

Dark Sickle Spell

Arcane Seeker Spell

Scratch "Spell"

Known Bugs & Issues

Some fixes were made this week. Thank goodness.

• (From week 1) Creatures can occupy the same Tile (and phase into terrain), due to relaxed restrictions.
• (From week 1) Cameras move slowly when returning from left and right boundaries.
• (From week 1) Health bars could be on a World Space UI Canvas.
• (From week 1) Wizard turns weirdly sometimes when moving diagonally.
• (From week 2) Rapidly casting Spells lags the game a bit.
• (From week 3) Colliding with a Creature (notably the lich) before it moves causes teleporting, due to improperly saved Tile data.
• (From week 3) Behaviour Creatures not navigating at all.  ->  Fixed navigation, but still needs work. (see Chapter 3)
• (From week 4) The Arcane Seeker Spell does not fire at the desired angles.  ->  Now functions as originally desired.