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View Full Version : Community Critique: Save It!



dislekcia
07-08-2009, 11:50 AM
Ok everyone, new concept here: We offer our constructive crits and comments on games produced in SA but not by members (for whatever reason) in the attempt to get the people who produced said game to participate and use this community.

That means VALUE. We give it. If a game is bad, remember how your first efforts went before you started asking for other dev's opinions and feedback. Then imagine having to take that output and keep working on it leading up to actual release, with very little understanding of polish! Lawks!

Our first community critique is on Save It (http://www.savingenergy.co.za/champions/index.php), the game that's supposed to teach youth (yup, THEM) about saving energy by giving efficiency tips and advice in the context of a game.

http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/2403/saveit1.jpg

So, community, if this game had been posted here before release, what would your crits, comments, feedback and advice have been?

dislekcia
07-08-2009, 12:10 PM
My feedback:

The gameplay is, unfortunately a little broken and not compelling. Your main mechanic is to move around the level faster than the enemy and undo his damage as he does it. This means that the major tension point revolves around the player's mobility, meaning that to make it more difficult, more and more tricky control sequences are required by the player.

This wouldn't be a huge problem (reminiscent of traditional platformers, for instance) if the controls weren't a classic mobile mistake: The game is presented in a perpendicular isometric view, not an issue until the controls are made to not match screen or button directions, argh! Down isn't down, it's actually down-and-left, ditto for the other directions. This confuses players and is highly counter-intuitive. The traditional solution to these problems on PC is to turn your keyboard to match the onscreen directions (try it, it works!) but that's impossible on a mobile phone, this game's targeted device. The best solution (although it would require a ton of graphic changes) would be to present the game in a 20 or 30 degree rotated isometric view so that there was a clear indication of a preferred direction for "down". Right now down could easily mean down-left or down-right and the distinction is entirely arbitrary.

When finishing a level, the popup screen doesn't behave like all the others in the game - it's not removed by pressing enter, instead you have to push spacebar. There is no indication of this...Presumably this was done as a response to users spamming enter as they moved around the levels and not even noticing the Level Over popup because their keystrokes dismissed it instantly. The easiest fix is to put in the text "Press Space to continue", but a better one is to give the user two buttons to choose from (a progress to next level and a default one that keeps them at this screen) so that they have to do more than input a single button to continue. That way you don't have to introduce a completely secondary continue keypress that's not used anywhere else and can focus on the same direction + select keys already established. I wonder what the secondary button is on phones and if anyone's aware of it?

The choice of character seems entirely arbitrary. If this is a player engagement choice, then it needs to happen earlier - before you go through menus to get to the "play game" part.

A wall of text as a tutorial isn't very helpful, especially if it's a voluntary tutorial that players have to look for. Most players will go straight into the game and probably lose very fast. The whole starting at no energy and not dying thing is a nice attempt to fix this, but it means that a player can start the game, randomly interact with an object and fail quickly as they try to work out what just happened. Advice would be to introduce the enemy later in the game, either halfway through the first level, or in the second level to give players a non-threatening chance to get to grips with what the game actually wants.

The music needs to go. You can get a lot better midi than that.

The popups with messages are slightly annoying - it's understood that a game with "educational messages" needs to present these to the player, but there should a better fit between the gameplay and the content so that this sort of "chocolate coated broccoli" stuff doesn't kick the player right out of their game experience.

That it for me, I'll probably give alternative designs that could get this message across a little less jarringly later (leading concept would be a game in which you manage a household as people go about tasks and try to prevent power cuts by turning things off, getting more efficient hardware or changing people's habits in the house).

Nandrew
07-08-2009, 12:50 PM
My comments:

+1 on the point of keyboard controls. Though if this is aimed at mobile as you say, then I think the keyboard issues are reflecting a poor "PC port" rather than an overwhelming problem. Mobiles have an elegant solution to the issue of "diagonal movement" -- they can simply use the diagonal buttons (1,3,7,9) to do their movement, and this spatially corresponds to movements in-game.

I'm not fond of the tutorial method either. In fact, my primary grief is that there's very scant explanation of win/lose conditions: it took me a little while to figure out on the first level that the imp was "recharging" stuff as it walked past, and that my goal was to get everything in the room energy-efficient in time. Of course, that would be forgivable. The merciless loss I encountered on stage 3, however, is not.

I got the impression that the timer in the bottom right corner was how much time I actually had to get my energy sorted out before I lost. Oh ho, no! It turns out that if the energy level actually reverts to maximum wastefulness at any given point (aside from the start of the level), one loses. This was never explained, and I had the misfortune of deciding to switch off a bathtub as my first move. The imp happened to be standing nearby, and immediately switched it back on, giving me a "game over". This is frustrating.

Another annoying factor is the compulsory username/email entry at the end. While I understand that player participation in these sort of things can enrich a game (leaderboards, communities, etc) it should never be compulsory. It reeks of underhanded e-mail harvesting, and it seemed that my only option was to either enter my name, or refresh and reload the entire flash if I wanted to play again.

I agree that the educational notes disrupt gameplay, but to be fair I can't think of a better way to do it right now. It's a fair critique, but it doesn't do much unless we can actively suggest an improvement to the matter.

I find that the avatar choice is indeed a bit superfluous from a game rules perspective, but I think it's a welcome addition in terms of just offering the player the choice of an avatar that they feel related to. It's not something that I'd recommend for a prototype, but it is one of those "polish elements" that persuade me to believe that the developers put a good amount of effort into this.

The entire game is well-presented: even if some aspects of control are frustrating, it's not BUGGY. The artwork is cool and (I brace myself for accusations of poor taste) I liked the midi track. I can't help but feel that more Game.Dev games need to be like this: imagine if we married the concepts that we have with the level of presentation and polish present in something like this. Hell, we'd storm the industry.

And, er ... hey, it does the educational part down to pat. I genuinely learned a thing or two about energy saving. \:D/

The gameplay seems a bit shallow, mebbe, but the target audience seems to be the youngsters, and I think that the simple "run around and switch things off before they're switched on again" thing actually *may* appeal to lightweight and very young gamers. Anybody can play this thing, it's shiny, it's cute and it may even be out of place for us to request a more complex or "adult" game experience. Do I have a point, or am I just being too generous?

----

Anyway, nice idea. I'd like to see more of these threads cropping up, that's for sure. And it would be great to rein in the developers for their side of things.

AndrewJ
07-08-2009, 01:46 PM
The movement issue++; Or at least let the user define the keys, suggesting 7, 9, 1, 3 on the numerical keypad or or Q, W, A, S on the keyboard as the movement keys. I find the need to face to item a bit annoying. It's probably related to the movement issue, but still, a human can flick a light off while walking past it with having to face it...

Why not just reset the player's score and let the player carry on playing from that level?

The tutorial needs some help. Like dis said, maybe introduce the bad guy only after a level or two. And make the tutorial skippable if you do this! (Please.)

Possible bug: I could move to the next tile without fully entering the first tile by repeatedly pressing the direction I wanted to go. I though downright was a combination of down(2) and right(6) so I was mashing away trying to move downright when I discovered this bug.

Also, one can't see the outline of Miss X-Static's nipples through her costume ;-)

Gazza_N
07-08-2009, 03:09 PM
Oooooh! I LIKE this idea! ^_^

Critique:
Movement control concerns have been raised, so I won't reiterate them. Control felt loose, especially since you needed to hit a movement key for each tile you wanted to move to, although I appreciate the reasons for this (being a cellphone game and all). I should note that repeatedly mashing a movement key would result in much faster movement than I think was intended. I managed to totally hax levels during my second playthrough by exploiting this.

I liked how the interactive objects would highlight when you were nearby, but I think the distance to trigger this should be increased, and that character orientation shouldn't matter. I got stuck on some levels because I couldn't find the next object to turn off (even when I walked right past it) due to its interaction hotspot being so precise, especially considering that the imp only visibly interacts with objects that have already been turned off by the player. Another example of ambiguity would be the diagonal-facing TV, which was highlighted by the arrow, but that I couldn't turn off due to my facing up instead of left.

I happened to like the immediate educational feedback when turning off items, as it provided context for my actions. What I disliked was seeing the same edu-bubble for every light I turned off, on each and every level. Surely once you've established that lights eat energy, there's no need to hit the player over the head with it over and over again? If a player is attempting to interact with a light without prompts, it means that they've learned something.

I share Nandrew's concerns with failure conditions. The instructions state that I need to maximize energy saving before the timer runs out. Neato. You can understand how confusing it was when, in the first few seconds of the first level, impson opened the window I just closed and I got hit with a Game Over.

Music was adequate as a backtrack, but is simple and repetitive. Not QUITE annoying, but there's no reason why it can't be lengthened a bit, unless memory is an issue. Game's rock-solid on the art side, I think. The characters and levels were distinct and well-detailed, and I never once found myself confused due to ambiguous-looking items.

And yeah. I also learned a few neat things playing the game, which means that it's mission accomplished, to a degree. ;)

dislekcia
07-08-2009, 03:42 PM
I happened to like the immediate educational feedback when turning off items, as it provided context for my actions. What I disliked was seeing the same edu-bubble for every light I turned off, on each and every level. Surely once you've established that lights eat energy, there's no need to hit the player over the head with it over and over again? If a player is attempting to interact with a light without prompts, it means that they've learned something.

That's a really good point you've hit on there. What about highlighting the problem objects in a level with say "electro vision" or something at the beginning of a level and then having the player interact with objects that AREN'T highlighted as "problem areas" to get bonus points? Things like turning off lights that aren't explicitly marked. That's real game-learning feedback there.

Plus I'd like it if the the game was a little smarter. For instance: conceding that at night time, some lights are needed, but not all. Perhaps finding the right combination of lights to keep the room lit but save the most energy would be an interesting meta-puzzle. During the day you could turn all the lights in a room off without having everything be dark...

herman.tulleken
11-08-2009, 03:21 PM
It is actually interesting to compare the game with this one:

http://www.turnitalloff.com/play.htm

They are so similar that either it was the same people, or the one is a complete rip-off of the other.
Whatever the reason, it gives us a rare opportunity to look at some very small changes, and how it affects game play.

One of the changes that is immediately noticeable is the change in narrative (and characters). "Turn it off" has a security guard, and saving electricity is part of his job, affecting promotions. The "Save it" game uses a superhero, and that [to me] looks a bit more artificial.

Also, the "devil's" actions in the TIO game is a bit more constrained, and there are small puzzles that I like very much (for instance, to switch off a computer, you have to lure the user away by making coffee).

But it looks like SI has been polished more (in fact, in TIO I was so frustrated that I only played two levels... I just couldn't pass the second level...)

ht