Responding to playtest feedback
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This week started with a playtesting session. I was prepared to skip it since we did not have a lot of new stuff to playtest. The group, however, insisted that we attend it anyway, and so we did. From the previous playtesting session the only major thing we had was a new control scheme, though admittedly, we did get some valuable feedback on that. The new control scheme (that we had changed from previous playtest session) was that instead of the player rotating the player-character using the mouse, the player turns the character clockwise/counter-clockwise by holding ‘A’ or ‘D’. I had suggested this because I thought that the precision of rotating using the mouse did not fit our slow paced game, where there are no fast enemies you need to be able to dodge quickly or something in that vein. However, the feedback we got was that the “tank controls” we now had were rather awkward to use. People constantly flew into walls and did not like how they had to kind of had to stop, slowly turn left or right, and then press ‘W’ again to recover from that. In the playtesting build, we had also included a ‘puzzle’, which involved aiming and throwing a rock at a stationary plant enemy. But people had a very hard time aiming the rock towards the plant, and there were many missed rock throws. 
Trying to position the character in a good spot to be able to shoot the plant, yet still missing. Mouse is not used here. So we are changing the controls again. Our new take is to seperate moving and aiming. The player now aims and shoots using the mouse, but still moves using the keyboard. 
A rough example on moving using keyboard and aiming using the mouse. It will be more precise than this, just running on bad code currently. We are also changing the keyboard movement so that instead of the player turning the character using ‘A’ and ‘D’, a WASD-key simply makes the player move in that direction. We will still code it in the way that the character turns smoothly when switching the directions, but the player will not have to turn manually. As of this week we have also decided to include traditional enemies in the game, and it was really hard to design even halfway decent combat around the previous control scheme.  |