Playtesting and Accessibility
A few weeks ago I put out an open call for playtesters on the Playdate Squad Discord server using an early "Test Flight" build of Patterns of the Wind, and I was fortunate enough to get feedback from several players. That's already informed several significant changes! Playtesting is always great at showing up just how different a new player's experience is to my own as the dev with an intimate understanding of the game mechanics and dozens of hours of practice. I can try to anticipate the new player experience but nothing beats actually hearing from new players!
The primary aim of the playtest was to get feedback on the controls and the ease of understanding the game's mechanics. It included a deliberately short tutorial as I figured tutorial design is best informed by first finding out what players struggle with most so that I can tailor the tutorial content accordingly. That tutorial has already undergone quite a few changes based on feedback with a lot of additional text and now looks like this:
Actually there is more to the tutorial than seen here because some of the tutorial text is conditional. For example the player starts the tutorial with only ten supplies, and while it's possible to complete the tutorial without running out of supplies (as seen above) a new player is much more likely to burn through them all so they can be taught about what happens in that situation. On running out of supplies I originally displayed the following message:
One unexpected piece of feedback I got on the tutorial was that it was frustrating to have so few supplies and run out, and it felt needlessly harsh considering they then just get given more to complete the tutorial anyway. I realised from this that the playtester wasn't seeing the above message as an intended tutorial prompt but as a failure state. Their suggestion was to increase the starting supplies in the tutorial, but my solution was instead to alter the text to make it less negative and more informative:
A final change I made to the tutorial following player feedback was narrowing the extent to which the player can drift left or right in the low and mid wind patterns so that the player stays more closely within the target area and is subsequently less disoriented as they're trying to learn the controls. It's definitely better now!
Outside of the tutorial and in the game proper a few more misunderstandings became evident. I was surprised to hear that players were misunderstanding that they were on a single looping map, believing that the balloon was returning to the bottom of the same map after leaving the top. In actuality there are (currently) four different maps that the player progresses through linearly before returning to the map on which they started. The first two maps however were using the same generation rules and while they were each uniquely generated it seemed that the two maps were not distinct enough at a glance to be obviously different. I have now changed the second map to use different generation rules so that all four maps have distinct features making them easily distinguishable.
The first playtest build also didn't have any indicator of when the balloon will move. A consistent piece of feedback I got was that this made it hard to control the balloon's travel. That itself didn't surprise me, but I was surprised to hear that because there was no clear indicator the actual mechanics of when the balloon moves were being misunderstood. Players mistakenly thought that the wind was blowing on a set tempo such that the balloon would move after exactly two seconds. This isn't the case! It was in fact how it worked early in development but I had already changed to a system where the wind builds up to a threshold in each direction. Addressing this misunderstanding motivated me to add the circular indicator seen next to the wind direction.
As well as misunderstanding certain mechanics playtesters were also just finding the game quite difficult! That's partly addressed with better tutorialising, but hearing the different ways in which playtesters were struggling to learn to play the game motivated me to implement several accessibility options.
Map Marker
By default there is no map marker and the player instead has to match the mini-map to the full map to locate their current position. This is a deliberate design choice so as to better emulate the act of consulting paper maps and charts and it adds an additional layer of cognition to navigation. Playtesting opinions were divided on this feature with some players quite keen to have a visible map marker. I recognise the difficulty of reading the map will vary with a player's spatial reasoning so there is now an option to enable a map marker - either permanently on, or blinking so as not to completely obscure the tile beneath it.
Wind Speed
By default the wind takes two seconds to reach the threshold for moving the balloon. I'm confident this is well balanced for an experienced player, but when trying to get to grips with simply controlling the altitude of the balloon it was proving frustratingly quick! Now the wind speed can be toggled between normal (two seconds), breezy (four seconds), and manual. The manual option still takes two seconds to reach the threshold for moving but the balloon won't actually move until the player presses A, eliminating the time pressure of the wind on controlling the direction of movement.
Supply Burn
By default supplies are continually used up in real time corresponding to the intensity of the burner. There is now an option to instead only reduce supplies on move by a fixed amount corresponding to the height of the balloon. This has been balanced to use supplies at a similar rate as the default behaviour, but it removes the time constraint on burning supplies.
Control Scheme
In a previous post I described the default crank controls for changing the height of the balloon. There's now an alternate control scheme using the D-pad instead. When using the D-pad the balloon moves in discrete height intervals with each up or down input. This is a much simpler control scheme with no skill-based challenge to changing or maintaining altitude.
These options can all be independently configured as desired. The specific combination of manual wind speed, supply burn on move and the D-pad control scheme transforms the game from a time constrained action-puzzle game into a pure puzzle game with no time constraints! It plays quite differently but is still balanced to help players of any ability engage with the core navigation puzzle at the heart of Patterns of the Wind.
There have of course been more changes beside the above to come out of playtesting and there are plenty more changes to the game in general still to make, but hopefully that's an interesting look into how I'm engaging with playtesters to improve the game. With that I think we're now finally caught up to the current state of development!