More Than a Feeling

We just finished our first round of testing! We had about 45 playtesters play our game and all-in-all, it we got a lot of incredibly useful feedback. The two major points being:

1. They want to communicate
2. They weren't completely clear on how they were affecting each others' gameplay

The first point is easily solvable; we as a team decided to take communication out of this first playtest in order to focus on the core gameplay, so putting that back in for the next playtest should help things immensely.

The second point is a bit tougher. A lot of our gameplay concepts are pretty complicated and have multiple layers in terms of how a player can affect another player. Here is a view of the gameboard (don't mind the fact that the characters are, uh, aliens with no clothing at the moment.)



The basic mechanics of the game are

1. Place blocks of the same color next to each other. Use the breaker pieces like this blue one in order to break apart these groups of blocks.
   
   
   
   
2. Placing blocks into rectangle arrangements gets you a rectangle bonus. The bonus that you get from breaking a rectangle is based on the shortest side of the rectangle. For example, if you have a 2 x 8 rectangle, you have 16 blocks x 2 = 32 points. If you have a 3 x 4 rectangle, you have 12 blocks x 3 = 36 points. This is by virtue of the fact that larger squares are much harder to get than tall and narrow columns.
   
   
   
   
3. If you get 8 points in a single turn, you send a white block to your bandmates. These white blocks take on the color of whatever block they fall on top of.
   
   
   
   
4. As your bandmates get higher scores, they send you a bonus row from the bottom of the screen. In a way, they're challenging you to do better, but they also give you a bonus to your score if you break them.
   
   
   
   
5. If you break a group of blocks with a breaker, but in doing so leads to another group of blocks being broken by a breaker that was already on the board, you get a chain multiplier.
   
   
6. This last part is probably the most complicated/confusing part of our game. Each character is represented on this meter. The color bar in the back is the average of each player's position on the bar. As you drop pieces onto your board, your position on the meter slowly decreases. When you use a breaker piece to break apart blocks, your position on the meter increases. As each player's piece increases, the average band meter can hit higher multipliers. Confused yet? I know we are.
   
   
   
   
   

Given how confusing all of this is, we had a meeting today with our advisor Jesse about how to fix these problems, and we've come up with a number of different ways both to convey the information much better, as well as just making the mechanics simpler, which should hopefully make understanding these gameplay concepts easier.

Here are the new and improved rules!

1. No audience meter
1. It's confusing. And not really doing its job. We'll put it on the sidelines for now.
   
2. Rectangle bonus
1. A 2x rectangle bonus (such as a 2 x 2 rectangle, 2 x 3, 2 x 4, etc.) gives all of your band mates a white block.
2. A 3x rectangle bonus (such as 3 x 3, 3 x 4, 3 x 5, etc.) gives all of your band mates a grey breaker.
   
3. Chain multiplier
1. If you get a 2x chain, you get a 2x multiplier to your break, and you also send a 2x multiplier to all of your bandmates. 3x chain sends a 3x multiplier, and so on and so forth.
4. Bonus row
1. When you clear your board completely, you get point bonuses as well as sending a bonus row to all of your bandmates.
   

Hopefully these changes will make the connection between bandmates more direct and clear. We'll keep you posted as we make more changes. If you're interested in signing up for playtesting, there's a link at the top of the page. Thanks!