Welcome to the forth development log for MiniMorph: Labs!

During this development, new levels have been added in preparation for the testing session. 

Levels

Laser level: 

This level contains lasers and the player must use the cubes to block the laser. In addition, the is a wall that the player cannot jump on and must use a big cube to jump on top of to climb over the wall. 

Throw Cube Level 

This level requires the player to bounce the cube into the glass. Once the cube is placed inside the glass, the automatic door will trigger and the player can progress to the next level. 

Laser and Throw

In this level, the player is now confronted with two mechanics previously learned in the past levels. 

Testing: 
A testing session was done to gather feedback about the game. A total of around 15 players had provided feedback. 

Testing Summary 

Gameplay, Keybinds & Level Design 

In general, most users had found the theme and visual design of the space lab to be appropriate based upon the concept statement of the game provided at the start of the feedback survey as displayed by the majority of the feedback rating as rated 4 to 5. 

Around more than half (60%) of the feedback gathered regarding level design and the tutorial had found the tutorials could be improved. Most responses to the tutorial were regarding the difficulty understanding the mechanics of the game and were not clearly communicated to the player. 

The plan to fix this issue is to improve the intuitiveness of the tutorial level and explanation of the mechanics through adding simple readable text explaining the mechanics to the user. In addition, the tutorial levels will change to consist of a simple instructional puzzle. For example, to teach the user about the cube size mechanic, there would be a puzzle for the user to make the cube into three different sizes, small, medium and large. In completion of this task, the user would then move onto the next tutorial puzzle. 

In regards to the keybinds, the greater majority had found the keybinds of the cube to be ‘good enough’ or ‘very intuitive’. 

• ZXC: change cube
• E: Pickup/Drop
• LMB: Throw 
• R,T: Rotate Cube 

However there was a great amount of feedback regarding the ZXC keybindings of the cube. Although the keybindings were intuitive as ZXC are located together, many players had found pressing these buttons to be awkward and had provided feedback regarding these keybinds. 

In regards to the keybinding feedback, the keybinds for ZXC will be remapped to a more comfortable location of 1,2,3.

Assets

Feedback was given about the individual design of the assets and the intuitiveness of some assets and functions. The majority of the feedback given to the asset, which was rated from a scale of 1-5, had found that the greater majority of overall results was rated over 4. As a result of the positive feedback, it was found that no changes were needed to be added to the assets design. 

In addition, feedback was given to the podium asset in regard to whether the player could intuitively understand the functionality and usage of the podium. The feedback was given on a text response and the majority of the responses indicated it was intuitive and the player knew what the podium could be used for. This is mostly similarity based to other games such as portal. However there were some responses which the player could not identify or know what to use the podium for. Therefore in regard to this confusion, to make the function less confusing, a change of design to indicate if the podium has been activated has been planned.

Overall Game Feedback 

In general, 80% of the feedback about the state and functionality and objects of the game including the cube, changing cube size and its interactable elements has stated ‘it’s fine’ (46.7%) and ‘good’ (33.3%). Many of the testers gave feedback towards some functions/features of the game that will be planned to be added to the game. This included 

• Longer throwing distance 
• Visual Clarity for changing cube size

In addition when asked about feedback on the criticisms of the concept of the game, no negative criticisms were given and overall 86.7% of the players had found the game to be fun. 

All the players had found the sound of the lasers when changing the cube size to be appropriate and fitting with an average rating for 3.92/5. There were no ratings of 1 and 2. In addition to the rating of the laser sound, a few testers had given feedback regarding the volume of the laser to be a little loud. To address this issue, there will be a volume slider added in settings in the UI. Users also gave feedback to add a sound if the player made an error or nothing was done. To address this issue, a sound will play played with the player encounters the following scenarios: 

• Player is trying to change cube size that is already the cube size that is being changed (i.e small cube to small cube size change)
• The player is out of range when trying to change cube size

When asked if the player had encountered any bugs in the game, all overwhelming majority of the responses were regarding the cube disappearing through the floor. This issue was a result of using a plane as the floor and has been fixed by changing the floor to a thicker object (cube). There was also some feedback regarding the doors being automatically unlocked or not showing. This issue has been fixed