Wii-U

Mixed Opinions: IndieCade Feedback

Back in June, we submitted a really early version of Colour Park to IndieCade. The game didn’t get nominated as a finalist, but did get feedback from a number of jurors. Interestingly, they all had different things to say. Note, the jury system is anonymised, so I’ve instead labelled them as Juror #1, #2 and #3 respectively:

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Juror #1:
This was obviously very early in development, but it shows potential for being something good. It took a few minutes for the concept to click, but once it did, it was easy to get the hang of it.

I don’t feel like there’s much meaningful feedback I can give at this point, as the game only has the very basics in place right now. I would like to see you take this further and resubmit next year.
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Juror #2:
I think the attempt to make a motion control game that uses the motion to map and match a color felt unnatural. I am aware that this suppose to be what the creator actually wanted to experiment with and make unique in the game, but it doesn’t seem to work well. The game plays like racing vs. guitar hero, however the motion controller is not a tight input like buttons, which makes controlling the game very hard, often hard to control tightly, and therefore frustrating, I also expected that such a game has progressive and dynamic music that follows the gameplay.
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Juror #3:
Game has interesting presentation and is relaxing to play. As a tech demo, it runs well and shows potential.

Goal should be more compelling, if there was any depth beyond matching colors it was unclear. Multi player gameplay did not seem to add much. There was no way to attack other players or interact.

There should be better feedback when users ‘hit’ or ‘miss’ their color. Soundtrack was interesting, but got repetitive after a couple of minutes.

I understand this is an early demo, and has an interesting idea (using the controller to find colors), but you might want to iterate on the concept and try out a couple of other ways to interact with the world, and other players.

It’d be easy to dismiss Juror #2 as simply “didn’t get it”, especially after reading the first Juror’s comments. However, the game has garnered similar feedback in the past from others. That they are fighting against the controls the whole time, and that makes the game frustrating.

The suspicion is some players are performance optimisers or perfectionists. Not a criticism I might add. As any sports person or musician will tell you, when your fingers pluck the wrong string, or the tennis ball hits the edge of the racket head, it feels off, and that registers long before you hear the accompanying discordant twang or see the ripple of the net. In guitar hero, you know unambiguously whether you’ve hit a note or not, both from on-screen indicators, and simply because you felt your finger press the wrong button. On the surface, Colour Park looks a lot like guitar hero and similar rhythm games, so it’ll both naturally attract those types of players, and potentially annoy the hell out of them.

Since the version submitted to IndieCade, the game has had effects added to show whether the player “hit” or “missed”. Even that is misleading though, since it’s a continuous scale: The closer to a colour match, the more points, or bigger the speed boost you get. The next step will be to reflect that on screen. The closer to a match, more particle effects go off, the more individual particles each effect produces, the brighter those particles, the faster they move, the longer their lifetime, and so on.

The rest of the comments from IndieCade just back up the experience from a couple of weeks ago. The game needs more layers of depth to keep people playing once the initial challenge of mastering the controls has been accomplished.

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Game developer working for Crystalline Green www.crystallinegreen.com