Monday, January 25, 2010

New additions

Alright, time for another update. We are getting ready for our first official activity release, so here's a rundown of the features added since last time.

Shop feature is fully implemented.
Door puzzles fully implemented.
Dungeon creator in development.
6 levels in game (not all have enemies/locks yet)
Difficulty setting in development

Look for the official release on activities.sugarlabs.org and hopefully we'll also have a new gameplay video on our youtube channel fortunehunter42 soon!

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Level up!

Hello again everyone, hope you had a good break and all that jazz. Here's what the latest goings on have been with MAFH. User testing went AMAZINGLY! The kids love the laptops (most wanted to buy one after spending 10 minutes with it) and they loved the game too. We got mostly positive feedback, and all but one student who doesn't play video games said that they would play a finished version. Here's a breakdown on the features of the game, and what they liked/disliked about them.

Controls (gameboy mode):
+Controls felt natural
+Felt like a gaming system,
-Some thought the laptop was too large to feel like a controller

Traversal:
+Maze like structure was challenging
+Not that difficult to navigate once acclimated to the controls
+Liked the lock/key system
-Some felt that the map should not rotate
-Dead ends were confusing

Attack/critical hit:
+Easy to understand
+Students liked practicing multiplication facts

Special (division) attack:
+Did more damage when weapon was equipped
+Liked visual representation
+-Roughly half of the students understood how to perform it, the other half were confused. This is due to the fact that the class hadn't covered fractions yet.
-No visual indication of a successful hit

Magic (geometry) attack:
+Was like a puzzle
+Was fun to figure out
+-Those with good spacial awareness/knowledge of puzzles were successful and enjoyed it, those who were not were slightly confused, but would try it more to understand it

Menus:
+Easy to navigate
+Everything was visible and clear

Difficulty:
on a scale of 1-10, difficulty ranged from 3-6, which is a good range for flow

General Complaints:
There should be more types enemies
There should be an indication of an enemy dying
There should be an indication of enemies being hit by attacks
There should be battle music
It should show what you have equipped in the stats screen


So basically, most of the complaints about the game were features that we are currently planning on adding into the game anyway. Most of the confusion in the traversal system can be solved by better level design, which we are also working on. A lot of the other things will be fixed when we put in cutscenes and animations. I just want to say that it was awesome to see the kids have a great time playing the game and learning at the same time. Keep up the good work!