After carrying out a full playtest session and making amendments based on the feedback that I gathered from the responses given, I carried out an additional peer-review session except that the main content that this feedback session would cover would be mainly about the design, layout and usability of my Wix website. This peer-review session was carried out using a similar Google Form to that of the playtest session except that the questions were more website design based, this feedback will allow me to make a range of amendments and improvements to the presentation of my work on my site and will ultimately allow me to improve my overall work in the Final Major Project. I included a link to my Wix site on the Google Form so the peer-reviewers were able to look at my website as they were progressing through the questions. Some of the questions I included in my Google Form were linked to my game however the main focus that I wanted was to gather improvements for my site.

 

Question 1 - Based on the layout of my site what would you deem the content, themes and style of my project to be? How can you tell this?

 

 

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The opening question was mainly focused on the layout of my site and whether the peer-reviewers were able to pick up on the theme and content of my project just by looking at the colour palette and layout design. This question included a mix of responses however the main point that I wanted to portray in my website design was shown to the reviewers and ultimately was picked up by the reviewers, for the most part the reviewers were able to pick up that my outcome would be ‘Retro’, ‘A digital game’ and based on ‘Zombies’ in some way, this is positive news as the reviewers were able to see the themes of my game straight away before even looking through my work or playing my game. This shows me that I have successfully been able to showcase the content of my work just through the layout choices and design choices that I had adopted in my website design. In addition, most of the reviewers were able to see clearly my inspiration for this project, that being Tomb Raider and the original top-down Grand Theft Auto games, however, one reviewers said that I should ‘link the theming of my website more with the intended theme of [my] game’ because they were unable to see the theme of my game from the layout and design choices, now I agree with this person that I should be linking the theme more with the theming of my game, but no one else had a problem picking up on the theme of my game based on my site, so I will not be making any amendments to my site theming but I will take their advice on board and will apply this to my work in the next FMP. 

 

Question 2 - What specifically did you like about my outcome and why?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The second question that I presented to the reviewers in the Google Form was based on what they liked about my outcome, (the game) and why. This question has produced a lot of positive responses and the main take away from this question is that the strong points to my game are the Art style, User Interface and also the story concept, this has me very pleased because looking back upon my first weeks of the project I was worrying about how I was going to carry out the design of my art pieces because I felt my skills lacked within that area, so this positive feedback has significantly boosted my confidence when it comes to the outcome of my art and art style. In addition, the extended research has significantly helped me to achieve this because without my research and experimentation into different art shading techniques my artwork would not have been on par with what it looks like today, this goes to show that my hard work has paid off and that my research has helped me to receive these such positive results. Going forward from these responses, I will not be making any improvements based around UI, Art or story because I do not want to change anything that all of my reviewers found interesting and liked about my outcome. This question was mainly included so I could see what areas of my outcome worked so I could see what mechanics and features work well together so I can apply all of this to the next year of my college journey.

 

 

Question 3 - What specifically could I improve in my outcome and why?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Moving forward to question three, I asked the all important question, what specifically could I improve in my outcome that would help me to polish my game and overall improve my final outcome. By reviewing the responses that I have received for this question I have noticed a trend in what areas I need to improve upon, one key area that stood out to me was that most of the reviewers were having difficulty with the player controls and suggested that I opt for ‘WASD’ movement controls instead of arrows because they felt that this movement is more natural for the player and to improve the comfort of of the players ‘Hand configuration’. This is a key point that was not raised to me when I carried out my sole playtest session and so I have learned that a wide variety of people prefer a different control scheme to suit their playtype and this is something that I had not previously considered during the development stages of this project, looking back I should have considered this approach and so I will be making amendments to the overall control scheme to my game in order to appeal to a wider playertype. This feedback based on control types has been extremely helpful and has opened my eyes to a problem that was not seen when playtesting and so I will be making the appropriate changes. In addition to this, another area that I agree on is changing the colours of my UI text because it feels ‘impossible to read’, it has been bought to my attention that one of my reviewers had a hard time reading some of the text given on the various menu pages resulting in them missing key areas of the how to play menu, this is an issue that I had personally encountered however, I feel that I need to adjust my colour schemes to better match the colour palette of my game, so I can change the font colours of my pages to make them more accessible to read.

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Moving on to feedback that I felt I do not need to make improvements on and disagree with, the response based on the speed of my dialogue boxes being very slow I completely disagree with because if a problem with my dialogue was to be that important then all of my reviewers would have mentioned this point, however only person mentioned this out of both this form and my previous form so I will not be making any changes to the speed of my dialogue boxes because I feel and most of my play testers feel that they are the right speed.

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In addition, the feedback based on changing the directions that I give the player when in between moving from level to level because they felt that the dialogue given was not clear enough to progress to the next level, now this I can see being a problem if the player is not focusing on the dialogue however I feel that adding a pointer arrow or mini-map would draw away from the overall theme of being trapped and being controlled, so I feel that the dialogue given is just enough that the player has an idea of where they need to go, in the end this is a puzzle game so the player needs to figure out where to go, I am not just going to slap a large arrow pointing to the next level because of the loss of immersion. Overall, I will not be taking this feedback on board because they were the only people to mention this over both surveys, the dialogue is just enough to give direction for the player and finally by adding pointers this would take away from the core themes that I am trying to portray in my game.

 

Moving to the last response that I disagree with, the response given about the camera angles being ‘jarring’ when trying to fight a zombie does not feel like that big of a problem that it would impact the overall gameplay experience because the player can still see where they are going and also only one zombie is present at that point in the bank level so it is not like the player is fighting off a large hoard of enemies. Furthermore, I will not be making any changes to my camera movement because this person is the only person to report this as an issue and casting back to the first playtest session I had a response saying that, that person really enjoyed the subtle camera movements, so based on this response and the response in the previous survey I will not be making any changes to my game camera angles and movements because most play testers and myself found this movement to be interesting and enjoyable.  

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Question 4 - Where can you see evidence of my experimentation being used in my final outcome?

 

 

 

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Question 4 was mainly based on whether my experimentation displayed on my website is present in my final outcome, this question will allow me to ensure that my experimentation links to my outcome. Looking through the responses from this question, the majority of my reviewers found that they could see the inclusion of my pixel art experimentation, inventory system and also my lighting effects, now this is extremely positive feedback as it shows me that my experimentation is extremely clear in my final outcome, however all of the reviewers could not see where I included water reflections into my game. I have included an array of reflections such as the code is reflected in the water in the first level, but this has shown me that I must look at adding more reflections to my game to ensure that my experimentation is clear and blatant in my game. Overall, I will make sure to make amendments to my reflections in my game to really showcase the use of my experimentation.

 

Question 5 - How could I improve the overall layout and content of my site?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The question 5 that I included in my Google Form was mainly about the overall layout and content of my site and how I can improve this to elevate my site and the presentation of my final outcome. The main area that jumped out to me when reading through these responses was that the reviewers found the text to either be too big or too small in certain circumstances, so one person found the paragraphs to be too long and also found the text to be too small to read, however another person found the headers to be far too big. As this was a recurring response amongst the reviewers I will look at amending the overall text size and layout on my site to better improve the readability of text for the user, I can achieve this by simply making the text boxes and borders larger to accommodate more text and this would also resolve the issue that was also mentioned were the user would have to scroll for long periods of time to reach the end of paragraphs and sections. Looking at the last response for this question, I received feedback that I should look at changing my background image to a more suitable and recognisable theme that links to that of my game, however this is the same person that mentioned such an issue in the first question I presented and as I said there I will not be making any changes to the background image of my site because firstly, most playtesters and reviewers found no issue with the image and were able to pick up on the themes, and finally in the first questions responses the majority of people were able to understand the theme of my game clearly, so I will not be changing my background image. 

 

Question 6 - How difficult did you find my outcome when playing?

 

 

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Moving onto question six, this question was a very closed question and I simply wanted to see how difficult the playtesters and reviewers found my game to be and overall I received the same response from 100% of my reviewers and that was that my game's difficulty is just right. Now this is excellent news because when I started to develop the game I was torn between the idea of having different difficulty levels, but I finally settled on one difficulty and having hints that could be toggled by the player as they progressed, so in the end my decision has seemed to have paid of because all of the reviewers found my game to be balanced in terms of difficulty. I will not be making any amendments to the difficulty of my game because as the responses show the difficulty works perfectly.

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Question 7 - Did you encounter any bugs whilst playing?

Expand on answer

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The final question that I asked my playtesters and reviewers was whether they encountered any bugs throughout their playthrough, the response from this question was a mixed bag because I received some positive feedback saying that people did not encounter any bugs, but the majority of players found one or two smaller bugs that impacted their gameplay experience. Looking through the vast feedback one response kept recurring and that was people reporting that they could re-enter buildings, now this is not really a bug because why would you want to go back to the previous level anyway and also when going back into the shop all of the puzzles would be complete anyway so it is not that big of an issue in terms of impacting gameplay because the player can simply walk out through the door again, so I will not be blocking off the shop after completing the level because as I have said it does not affect any of the gameplay before or after that level. Moving on, I feel the only relevant feedback that I gathered from this question was that the mute and unmute question would not work all of the time and the button would not be able to be toggled off, I will look into this issue and this is definitely something that I will address when it comes to improving my final outcome.

 

Another response that I gathered was that the player found they could not progress further in the first level because the hints were telling them to use the lock pick when they did not have a lock pick, now this issue has not been recorded by any other player and this may be solely an issue on the players end because the hints for that section should not be visible until the player has picked up the lock pick from the basement and I have not encountered this issue either when testing, so I will look into it but will not be changing anything based on hints and level progression because only one person reported such an issue.

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In conclusion, going from this peer review session I will be making many edits, amendments and improvements to my website and also final outcome to ensure that they are both polished before final submission. The three areas that I will make amendments to based on this feedback are, I will be reviewing the layout of my website making sure all content is consistent in size, design and layout, changing the control schemes and button interactivity of my game and finally ensuring that all experimentation can be easily seen being utilised in my final outcome. All improvements to my site can be found below and my final improved version of my outcome can be found at the bottom of the outcomes page.

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Website Amendments

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Following on from the peer-review I stated that I needed to make large amendments to my website layout and design in order to meet the feedback that was presented to me by the reviewers. Most reviewers stated that  they wanted me to 'Increase the box sizes to get the text to not take up as much space', they also stated that they found themselves scrolling down the pages of the website for a long time in order to finish reading paragraphs and text. So following on I have made various changes to the layout of my website and these changes before and after can be found attached below.

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Before changes: Before changing text size and also adjusting the size of the text boxes.

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After changes: After changing the font size and also adjusting the text box sizes on the website pages in response to the feedback that I gathered.

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Game / Outcome Amendments

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Following on from the peer-review I stated that I needed to make many improvements to my Outcome in order for it to function correctly and also to ensure that it is if the best quality. Many of the response gathered in the peer-review stated that I should 'Remap movement to WASD', 'Change the green text to be something more clear' and also they found that the  'Mute button cannot be toggled back off'. These were the key changes that I wanted to make to my outcome and seen as I was only allowed to make three changes I narrowed the button and text into a Quality of Life umbrella, so I was able to address both issues but still class it as one because it focuses on the core quality of the game, whereas the movement was more of a control issue. I have addressed these issues and made improvements to the outcome based on this, the before and after improvements can be seen below.

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Before movement change: Before changing the control scheme layout from arrow movement to WASD movement.

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                                                                                                                                                                          Code before moving too WASD                                                                                                                                                                                        movement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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                                                                                                                                                                            How to Play menu before making                                                                                                                                                                                  changes to both text and also the                                                                                                                                                                                  control scheme featured on the                                                                                                                                                                                      movement type.

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After change: After changing the movement to WASD instead of arrow movement.

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                                                                                                                                                                          Code after moving too WASD                                                                                                                                                                                            movement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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                                                                                                                                                                            How to Play menu after making                                                                                                                                                                                      changes to both text and also the                                                                                                                                                                                  control scheme featured on the                                                                                                                                                                                      movement type.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before text change: Before changing the text colour on the How To Play menu in response to feedback

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                                                                                                                                                                            How to Play menu before making                                                                                                                                                                                  changes to the font colour.

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After change: After changing the text colour to red so it was more visible against the background. 

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                                                                                                                                                                            How to Play menu after making                                                                                                                                                                                      changes to the font text in order                                                                                                                                                                                    for  it to be easier to read

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Following on from making the amendments that followed the peer-review, I decided to fix one bug that the play testers found and that was that my shadows do not always appear, as this is a feature that I experimented with it was paramount that it was blatantly obvious that I utilised the feature in my game in order for my research and experimentation to be relevant to my outcome. 'I don't remember seeing any water reflections', this is one of the responses I gathered so I took the decision to improve the quality of my reflections and make them more obvious because obviously they were not clear enough. 

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Before shadow change and fix: Before changing and fixing the shadows produced by objects when they are overlapping a water source.

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                                                                                                                                                                            Level one reflections / shadows                                                                                                                                                                                      before making improvements.                                                                                                                                                                                  

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After change and improvement: After changing and improving the implementation of shadows and reflections.

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                                                                                                                                                                            Level one reflections / shadows                                                                                                                                                                                      after making improvements.