King's Bounty Playtest #1

Questions

1. How does it feel to jump, hide, and interact with objects?
2. Did you use the grapple to escape from guards?
3. Were the objectives easy to find?
   1. Did you understand what to do when encountering an objective?
4. Was hiding worthwhile to do in order to sneak past guards?
5. Did you notice when guards would spot you?

Playtest 1

1. How does it feel to jump, hide, and interact with objects?

• Jump was a little slippery. Hiding made sense, understood the idea when interacting with crates and boxes. Didn’t utilize the save system.

1. Did you use the grapple to escape from guards?

• No. The grapple was cool, but not very useful

1. Were the objectives easy to find?

• Yes

1. Did you understand what to do when encountering an objective?

• Yes, except the escape objective. Having to press e after running outside was confusing. The glowing lights on the objectives were obvious and there were only so many possible buttons, so the interact key was assumed to be the way to complete the objective.

1. Was hiding worthwhile to do in order to sneak past guards?

• No, you are able to just parkour over them and run past.

1. Did you notice when guards would spot you?

• No, they only looked like they walked back and forth. It was difficult to see any change in their behavior. 

Additional Feedback: Platforms can be kind of hard to see since they blend in with the wall.

Playtest 2

1. How does it feel to jump, hide, and interact with objects?

• The jumps feel smooth but there is a bug where the character can’t attack the guards, and the player is kept in the state of crouch

1. Did you use the grapple to escape from the guards?

• No, you can easily jump over those guards, and they can’t catch you if the player keeps moving..

1. Were the objectives easy to find?

• Yes, they are pretty easy to spot during the game

1. Did you understand what to do when encountering an objective?

• Yes, the objective is very clear to see, but the interact key is a bit confusing.

     4. Was hiding worthwhile to do in order to sneak past guards?

• No, I just jumped over them.

     5. Did you notice when guards would spot you?

• Yes, they move faster and are alerted quickly when the player is in vision.

Additional Feedback: The playtester hopes we can finish the crouch bug.

Playtest 3

1. How does it feel to jump, hide, and interact with objects?

• The jump feels too instant and spammable(no delay after landing)
• Hide is finicky: could hide from too far away and player was not in the box at times
• No movement or interaction delays make the game feel like a speedrun, encouraging button spamming.

1. Did you use the grapple to escape from guards?

• Yes, but the jump is so strong that most cases can be handled with just jump

1. Were the objectives easy to find?

• Trying to initially find the red objective marker was difficult, but once it was found it was easy to recognize as an objective

1. Did you understand what to do when encountering an objective?

• Yes. Interacting is intuitive after interacting with the first door, and previous game experience helped me know to interact with the objective as well.

      4. Was hiding worthwhile to do in order to sneak past guards?

• No there is little to no use because you can jump the guards

      5. Did you notice when guards would spot you?

• Notice animation was not obvious enough, but it was clear when the guard would seek me

Additional Feedback: 

• Adding more guards would increase difficulty, making the game more challenging and enjoyable.
• The bottom part of the map feels empty. It needs additional mechanics or content besides the two wandering guards.
• Grappling can be useful, but I'd like to see parkour sections that require it like crossing large gaps or reaching walls that are far away.
• Adding different types of guards would add variety.
• Combining mechanics causes bugs, like grappling diagonally after grappling and hiding at the same time
• Infinitely stunning and pushing floating guards is amusing, but is likely not intended gameplay.

Overall Takeaway

One of the consistent comments throughout the playtests was the usefulness of the hiding mechanic. Most playtesters mentioned that they were easily able to jump over enemies in order to reach the objective. There was no particular reason to hide behind crates or wait for enemies to pass before moving on. If we were to iterate on the game our team would like to add more enemies and tweak their AI so that they are more aggressive in searching for and hunting down the player. Another addition could be to add a detection meter which would increase when the player is spotted.

The playtesters understood how the objectives worked; they could distinguish what their objective was and how to achieve/interact with it. Our team is happy with the results of the objective system. The only thing that we would change would be to improve on the UI so the objective text looks a bit prettier and add an assassination objective to one of the guards.

Overall, we think that the building blocks are there for a solid game. Playtesting has given us insight into what we should change in order to achieve the desired goals for the game. Our focus from the beginning was stealth platforming, so we would like to change the enemy AI to encourage more hiding and crouching in our next iteration.