Testing for the game was a success. It was extremely helpful watching fresh players figure out the controls and physics system of the game, and showed us all the important parts that need to be worked on. A few changes were actually made alongside testing, with total of 4 different new builds being pushed to the itch.io page with feedback and bug fixes during the 2 hour session.

For testing we made use of a Google forms sheet to get reports on how to improve the prototype as well as gauge player feedback and feelings towards the prototype. The following form was used:

https://forms.gle/1GkikVXdteKvHSJGA

Bugs

Tester bug reports written for us include: 

• Falling forever after jumping, falling through the floor, etc. 
• jumping grabbing and throwing quickly launches u upwards 
• player sometimes free falls on land
• The camera keeps shaking so I can't play the game :( 
• mega jittery camera and floating on the rocks 
• Jittery Movement, physics can be crazy. Stuck in weird spot when going to a checkpoint (falling infinity) 
• Hits against the nests occasionally didn't register 
•  Attacking pillar powerup did not seem to damage enemies. 
• punching boulder was a bit tricky, only registered as a punch to it in certain places
•  Lighting is janky when rotating camera

One issue that stumped us was that some players experience mega jitters (as we titled it) where their model was stuck on something completely unknown that other players had no issue with. We thought maybe it was a hardware issue or a screen refresh rate issue but we honestly have no idea.

A few bugs such as infinite falling and attacking the 'nests' (enemy spawners) were patched during the session.

Other bugs that need fixing - and some potential plans to address them: 

• Camera randomly breaking
• Jittering could be to do with people having controllers plugged in
• Rock bridge causes floating animation permanently - Likely an issue with the rigidbody or collider, potential fix by editing those elements.
• Camera randomly zooming inside Sisyphus sometimes
• Mines and platforms puzzle is basically impossible - Issue with a change of physics after building, will need to trial different layouts to make these doable.
• We forgot to put smooth shading on a bunch of the assets - Put the smooth shading on them ;P
• Player randomly sometimes falls into/through the island - Usually caused by the boulder falling underneath the ground, dragging player with it through the ground.
• Rock bridge doesn't have a respawn box (but only sometimes??)
• The pillar powerup doesn't causing enemies to lose health - currently enemies only take damage from colliders tagged with 'boulder' so that will be a quick fix.
• Player respawner send you under the map and you accelerate like in portal o-o - Issue with retained velocity after respawning, simply need to normalise any force when respawning.
• Enemies float too high off the ground - Issue with the navmesh being not quite synced up with the terrain.
• Player doesn't die when the health reaches 0 - We forgot to put in a check for it ;P
• Trigger to detect if player leaves tutorial area doesn't get deleted so they can walk through it again and trigger a second gameloop - Remove the trigger when collided and activated.

Gameplay and intuition

• The clearest observation was that we did not have enough of an explanation for the controls. I had put a tooltip that said "use mouse buttons to manipulate the boulder", but not many players even read the sign as it was placed further out from spawn. This should instead be right in a clear path for the player.
• Testers more often than not needed to be told that there was a path to follow to go forwards, so a much more defined path with a unique texture should be created for the player to walk on.
• Players got confused by the teleporter at first, since they were teleported without warning. This was quickly changed to include a tooltip explaining their objective in front of them.
• Puzzle islands were not clear on their objectives and need more obvious paths/goals. When asked in the feedback survey majority of people agreed that the islands were a bit confusing, and they were given majority 3/5 on a scale of how intuitive they were> We suspect this is only higher due to the fact that once the players understood their goal through playtime/explanations from us, it became simpler.

Testers were asked "If you were to make the game more enjoyable, what would you change?", they responded with:

• Ability to pull the boulder towards yourself would solidify the mechanics and make it very fun for me 
• I think having different enemy movements would make it more fun, but apart from that the basic mechanics are fun on their own less
•  The physics are overreactive and jiggly, to the effect that objects feel weightless and hard to control.
•  Movement is too difficult, I found it hard to punch the ball the right way
•  being able to have multiple different selectable powerups. 
•  Have some reward for defeating enemies/spawners at night, as currently you can just outrun them all. 
•  Shorten the travel distance between certain points / checkpoints. 
• Make the horde enemies a bit easier to defeat.

The horde enemies was one of the first suggestions, since during development the enemies were set to much higher health than they should have been. This was one of those changes we made concurrent with the session, and pushed a new build while testing was still going and was one of the most agreed suggestions due to the simple fact that killing large numbers of enemies instantly is very fun and gratifying, particularly when you through in the blood particles that spill out when defeated.

Other suggestions for future changes we had were; rewards for killing a spawner (such as health packs or stat boosts), auto-ending day phase after collecting powerup (motivation for getting a powerup after already having one)

A potential solution for several of the suggestions to do with lack of motivation or reason to do things such as kill enemies, spawner, or finish day loops fast could be resolved with a currency and shop system, we will likely not touch on this concept in the prototype but such a thing would be a very likely addition in potential future builds, potentially having a shop active during the day.

Much of the physics issues were a result of underestimating how hard it is to get physics working and feeling right in a game like this, in future this kind of system would be much more manageable to be written from scratch as opposed to trying to cobble together pre-written code with patchwork methods to make it work the way we want.

Visuals

The reason for collecting data on people's opinions on the visuals was that one of the selling points for the game was the visual style. We wanted to know if we managed to deliver or not.

There was overwhelmingly good feedback on the visuals and models for the game. Everybody loved the animations and the models, and most people thought the cel shading was nice. There were a few issues with the terrain being so 'blank' that people didn't realise the floor was walkable and thought it was a drop-off.  These issues can be fixed by adding some dimension to the terrain (something that we previously had but had to turn off to port to WebGL for.. compiler reasons..) 

Some of the tester feedback for visuals is as follows: 

I feel that getting these responses for our prototype build shows that we have potential for the market with our visual style.