Feedback Week.

Dev Diary #3

After submitting our game last week, this week's focus was playing other people's submissions and learning to give constructive criticism and feedback. Talking to others in my class and playing other people's games made me realise two things; 1) our game lacked something that made people want to replay it and 2) communication was a common problem in most teams. Whilst it was mildly reassuring to know that it wasn't just our team that struggled when it came to communicating ideas and role distribution, it did make me more determined than before to ensure that this doesn't happen again in the next project as I doubt I'll have the time to put in as much work as I did this project.

Regarding our game and it's playability, the feedback we received from classmates only confirmed what we already knew, people thought it was definitely cute but that is was too repetitive and had little to do in terms of being entertaining. During development, we briefly exchanged ideas on how we might make it more fun by adding features like a timer that gets shorter the longer the game goes on and something that you have to avoid petting otherwise you'll be caught out but due to the issues we faced and the short time-frame to complete the project by, we decided to stick to the original concept. Reading these comments made me reflect on what I had learnt in our Game Design and Context module, and how I might define a game. It made me question whether the 'game' we submitted really qualified as a game at all and how I might ensure future projects meet the requirements and hopefully also become more entertaining because of it.