dungeonsoffear - 2018-03-09

I can't believe I didn't ge ton here to talk about my first player test.

Some friends agreed to indulge me and try the game during our ski trip. It went really well in my opinion; my friends seemed into it, and there were no major bugs that stopped the test. The only qualms were some minor room and scoring bugs, and UI tweaks that I knew were already an issue.

The biggest issue people had understanding was the transition from making a decision to the next room. Even though watch_dungeon changes when the room is ready, players were still trying to enter again, which took you to the same page you just did, only to have it report "a decision has been made" error. So tonight I made it so when entering a room, if the room is still in progress, it will tell the user so, and tell them to refresh when ready. Obviously another longpolling implementation would be nice, but I can do that in the future.

Also tonight I reevaluated the invite player page. Initially I thought of switching to a form based approach, where players enter the names. This was due to my concern of people spamming invites to strangers. Another problem was player names are not unique, so it might be hard to tell via a checkbox who is who if they share a name. But, in the end, I decided that 1) making players enter long and complex names on a phone would be awful 2) it would be nice to be able to play with strangers sometimes 3) spamming will still happen and 4) spamming isn't a problem yet, so why fix it? So instead of changing anything, I just patted myself on the back for practicing lean product development, and moved on.

Next week I have another opportunity for a player test during a work retreat, so I want to do a few more things before Tuesday:

  • gnarled riddle is broken. I'm not sure why, but it was acting very strangely
  • ties are not correctly calculated in final scoring. this is a great opportunity to write some unit tests
  • ensure no scrolling for the watch screen ui
  • what to do with pants shitter. Should I nix it or make it something like 2 minutes? This one can wait a while longer.

I marked on my calendar GDEX, which is in September. One of my new years resolutions is to start getting the word out and finding players, so its time to be brave and put myself, and dungeonsoffear, out there.

2 Hours