Adventure Game W.I.P.

[AndrewC]

Hey everyone, my friend and I are developing a first person adventure game and would love some feedback. We are using Maya and the Unity Game engine.

We've created a little Easter egg hunt mini-game using our environment. Try it at here

We're using this mini-game as a first-pass playtest of our environment. It logs basic information about which rooms players tend to frequent and how many eggs they find, and we're hoping that we can use this info to optimize our puzzle layout and help guide the player through the game.

The graphics are pretty rough right now, but If any aspect of the level design is confusing or frustrating, please let us know!

Also if you scroll down on the website there is a test of one room which is light baked to show the visual quality of the game.

[Reactor]

There be holes in the floor and floating models in that there house. Other things-

- The game froze after playing it for a while, and Opera crashed.

- Picking up eggs was a pretty sleep-worthy activity. Whatever info you get from it must be pretty worthless, because all it shows is where people go when they're about to die from boredom.

- The mouse pointer wasn't captured, which is pretty annoying when you have a dual monitor setup.

Work on bumping up the entertainment level for your tests, and fixing the technical issues. Without that, people will either avoid them or never come back.

[trinistry]

Firefox crashed too after 1-2 minutes playing.

[jhocking]

Will try the demo when I get home, at work right now.

I'm wondering though what is the point of playtesting a mini-game unrelated to the final gameplay? I mean, it sounds like you are wanting to find out which rooms players gravitate toward, but logically that depends on what activity they are engaged in. Thinking about real life, if I want to read a book I head to the living room, if I want to check my email I head to the office, and if I want to fix a meal I head to the kitchen.

I could see an early playtest without the final gameplay useful to see what people think of the controls, but then why the easter egg hunt or movement logging?

[AndrewC]

Yeah we understand the model has some problems. We are just trying to get some information about the way people relate to our environment. We want to know which areas get frequented when someone is trying to find something which is a big component to adventure games.

Sorry if it's boring right now. Any play testing we get is useful and some people liked finding the eggs. We put the counter in there so it wouldn't feel like a fools task. Maybe some of the eggs are too hard to find.

Anyway thanks for trying it.

Andrew

[techbear]

It crashed my Firefox, as soon as I tried to pick up an egg.

The house looks very detailed, but very sterile and bland.

Me (the camera POV) seems quite tall, but I may have had the assumption that your game was about a mouse or child or something else short.

Good luck with it!

[AndrewC]

The height issue is weird. We are doing everything to scale but people always think the player is too tall. We have lowered the player height by 25 percent but it still seems too tall for people. Maybe working to scale doesn't always translate in games.

Also I know the environment is sterile but we removed a lot of the furniture and textures so it would run in a web browser. The next version of Unity will have advanced occlusion culling which we plan to take full advantage of.

Thanks for trying it.

Andrew