"Very fast paced, fun"

"It was pretty fun."

"Great time waster."

Overall we had some great feedback from our play testers.

• 55% of our play testers rated the prototype 5/5
• 77% rated the movement as "Lots of fun!"

It's great to know people liked the direction our game is heading. Our biggest criticism was wall bouncing, with 66.67% of the play testers indicating that it was frustrating at times and that they found it easy to lose control and get stuck in a bounce loop, as well as finding it disorientating at times.

Wall Bouncing: We have brainstormed some ideas regarding the wall bouncing and how to refine it. Our hope is to lower the difficulty of entry so it's more difficult to spin out or get stuck in a loop, while also retaining the current high skill ceiling for hitting walls with optimal bouncing and boosts. Another refinement made to the wall bouncing mechanic was to remove the 'camera shake' when the player hits a wall, as it was a leftover mechanic from when hitting walls was a punishment. Many players naturally interpreted the camera shake as an indicator they were doing something wrong and so avoided wall bouncing again. We also thought this might alleviate some of the disorientation.

After testing we discovered a bug related to our wall bouncing logic. We had set up the logic to prevent players hitting colliders in quick succession, but had only applied that logic to the visual bounce tickers and the wall push, so even though we stopped the visual effects and the punishment for hitting walls from counting, walls hit during that short immunity would still increase player speed. We have fixed this issue now and all the entirety of the wall bouncing logic (from pushing the player away from wall to, to the UI, to increasing speed) has the same short immunity.

Player Controls: As mentioned above, the majority of testers enjoyed the player movement and how the controls felt, with 66.67% of testers saying the snail feels good to controls and 61.1% stating it was fun to maintain the increased speed via wall bouncing. Based on the questionnaire feedback, the snail movement and controls are working well and don't need any radical altering. However, the development team noticed while observing testers that we had to explain how to speed up through wall bouncing rather quickly or the tester would get bored. This an issue with the game design which is discussed in the next paragraph.

Game Design/Level Design: A big issue with our test track is that it doesn't have visible walls, which meant that people thought they would fall off, or didn't know to hit them. As part of the game involves hitting the walls to go faster it was a huge flaw in how we communicated our mechanics to the player. Originally, we had simple low walls, but as we heightened the colliders, we turned the low visible walls off. As we had grown accustomed to our own game, it never occurred to us that it would be so obtuse for new players. We intend for there to be visual walls in the final version of the game, and for the final version of our prototype we will make sure at least placeholder walls are present in some form.  As for the design of the tracks, they were largely well received with 66.7% of testers saying they felt good and were of great length.

UI Design: We also had feedback regarding confusion with the UI. Testers were noticeably confused about the difference between the lights and the speed meter, with the natural assumption that the lights were indicating speed. Some players also found it difficult to check the UI while racing, and hard to visually track the tickers decay  so they would know they could hit a wall again. To alleviate some of these issues, the UI has been streamlined to combine the speed and wall bounces into 1 display, and changed the ticker to a much more clear sliding bar. We also removed the 5th light, noting that it was redundant and only served to confuse the player by motivating them to fill all 5 circles. In the new display there are only 4 "lights" to fill, with 1 additional hit serving to overload and reset the speed - this is mechanically identical to before, but much clearer to the player. While this doesn’t address the difficult of  players visually watching the UI, we hope this will mitigate confusion over which element indicates speed, as well as reducing the number of separate UI elements for the player to interpret.

Sound Design: Audio feedback, or lack thereof, was another common complaint, and we received plenty of ideas for what to implement for sounds. Including "engine noises" or "speed" sounds to audibly gage how fast you are going, "bounce" sounds or ticker increasing/decreasing sounds using pitch to convey getting close to 'overload' slowdown. 

Two Player Mode (the Competitive Mode): Unfortunately, as the testing sessions were online, the development team could not find an easy solution to simulate local two player over the internet and it would have been too hard to set up with every single play tester. This meant that the other half of the game didn't get properly tested. As a result it’s difficult for the development team to know where to improve or alter for this feature, including major elements such as power ups.