Really awesome concept here, I would love to see it polished and tightened up. Movement felt a bit slippery and there were awkward collisions, but I think it has a lot lot lot of potential. I am not sure if pressing down and going up with a rope makes sense in the physics sense, but I think it is fun. lol
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Absolutely invaluable feedback, thank you so much! My takeaways:
- Try out a hold/release control system, see if that's more intuitive with a first time player
- Add easing to the rappel action. Always add curves to animations.
- Allow diamonds to be collected by grappling them. Could lead to fun trick shots.
- Sort out collisions like getting caught jumping on the corner of boxes and pushing into the wall when rappelling against it.
- I actually made things slippery to help with collisions. The slippery ramp was intentional to force you to time a grapple as you slid down it, losing progress if you missed - but was that more frustrating than "challenging but fun"?
- Make the outer walls ungrappleable. I've seen a couple of people do the thing you did where you're slowly scraping up the wall. You can't really swing from there and it doesn't look like the free flowing movement I'm going for. The limitation should help me guide the player more too, instead of letting them cheese their way over any obstacle.
- The one way platform needs to be removed or made more obvious or be taught to the player in isolation first. I was screaming at the screen when you finally went to check it out and (sensibly) concluded it was an impassable route.
- Better level design. I might start off with the rope locked to force players to learn moving and jumping first, and guide them through a series of increasingly difficult obstacles to overcome with the rope. An observation from watching you though is that gamers will go after the shiny thing barely visible above them if they think they can trickshot their way up to it with enough tries, over following the well lit path to the right that's supposed to ease you into it. I feel like the gem at the very top was a good use of this "tease" design pattern, but the starting area was a complete distraction.
- Down-roping as I'm now gonna call it is definitely intended, since my inspiration for the "rope" is Worms. In that you can't specifically aim down, but you can end up in the situation where the rope anchor is below you and you can push off of it like a telescopic rod. I'm wondering how I can teach this mechanic better (it's counterintuitive to expect a rope to work like that), but you did figure out exactly how I'd intended for that top gem to be obtain with enough play. I feel like down-roping fits well into my "find the fun" goal at least!
Awesome, I think you're definitely on the right track with how you're taking the feedback. I too yell at the screen whenever someone playtests my game lol, its a part of the process. We spend so long on our own games that we develop an intuitive sense of how to play. But that means that we really play our own games very very differently from first time players, and that's where the disconnect lies. My biggest takeaway from gamedev is how much good games communicate and guide the player, which is really hard to do right. As you said, for your game you should try to guide the player a bit more. Try playing through tutorials of other professional games and studying what they do, how they do it. Mobile game tutorials are good too, there are certain patterns you can follow with pausing the physics and darkening the background until a player does the correct action, etc.
Keep it up and keep following the fun like you said. Telescopic downroping and more levels that focus on specifics of the mechanic could be really fun. Would love to see more of this