My final project / test for my Mobile Game Design class was to playtest Battle Gem Ponies with a complete stranger who's not familiar with RPGs (and most games in general) and get valuable feedback on accessibility. This little session gave me a lot of ideas on how to make the game's presentation more clear on a pick-up-and-play level. I adjusted some menu elements and added a small bit of polish to my "extras" notes in the design document.
In terms of readability improvements I'm going to have all clickable buttons shimmer every few seconds (like you see in match 4 games) and realign things in the class matchup menu to make it clear that there are 2 rows of classes to look at instead of 4.
The playtester also gave me the idea of color theming the attacks to match that of their classes. For example, Scatter Bomb is a Surge/Fire move that looks like a bunch of tiny yellow orbs being tossed at the enemy's feet before exploding into red-orange flames. I was just going to have random things that looked cool, but this gives me a solid design place to start from.
I'll be putting as many of these new readability features as I can into the first public demo.
No comments:
Post a Comment