I weren’t sure wheter to post this in Game Design or here in General Discussion, but in any case…
I’ve been updating the main menu for my game recently and an idea just came to me that I could use some empty space I had left over for a text, mentioning the state of the game- sort of to encourage people who test it to spare a few minutes to give me feedback and thoughts.
As I was done setting up the little text window I became slightly unsure though, does it give some sort of desperate appearance or just make the menu clutter-ish? Should I perhaps just stick to mentioning this on my game blog and indie db and skip it in-game all together?
I think if you want meaningful data you need to get a very large sample size, usually through analytics that automatically track the behaviour of all users. I’ve contemplated whether it would be a good idea to integrate short a/b questions into the main menu to get data from. You could use data you collect on user behaviour to funnel users that like your game towards writing reviews or getting them to recommend the game to friends, or target questions on how to improve the game to people that show lesser degrees of satisfaction with the product. I’m not into mobile games but they love their analytics and probably have perfected that kind of thing already.
I’m not so sure you should give too much about individual opinions, you can’t make a game that everyone likes equally. But something like a streamlined bugreport feature with auto-screenshot, and attached data like a savegame or something like that being automagically transported to you from within the game, might be really useful for you.
Good UX design involves making things as clear as possible so the user feels in control of the product and actually enjoys interacting with the UI. Since your average user has absolutely no interest in giving you feedback, perhaps you shouldn’t take up so much space of your menu for this. Possibly a small hint leading to a sub window for the curious users.
Also, in mobile game development, usually you want to reward the user when you ask them to perform an action that you believe they aren’t genuinely interested in. I think that overall this is good practice if you want to maximize user feedback received.
A single “Feedback” button might be less obtrusive but still invite people to share their thoughts.
Analytics are good if you have a lot of players, or if you want to identify points in the game where players get stuck/spend a lot of time. If you only have a few players, user stories via a Feedback survey might be more useful to learn about bugs, points of confusion, and ideas for improvement.
This. I’ve integrated feedback and bug report buttons into my current demo.
When you open the game there’s also a message that appears explaining that the game is in development, to clear things up for anyone who doesn’t yet know what to expect.
Thanks! Helped me out quite alot, I actually hadn’t even thought about analytics to be honest. I think I still want to keep a feedback button though, but as you guys suggest I should perhaps just make it a button saying “feedback”.
This is an interesting approach - like @angrypenguin we have a feedback button in our demo build - however I’ve chosen to place it in two important places instead of the main ‘game’ UI. We have it on the instructions page - which pops up before getting into the main play area - and can also be accessed at any time via instructions button within the main play area. The second feedback button is on the gameover win/loss popup.
I’m mostly interested in getting feedback on the mechanics and the rules of the game, although any feedback from those who are interested enough to send an email - is good to have - unless it’s just crap feedback - “game is crap - you should retire”.
This is a great idea.
We’ve also went back and forth with this - my colleague wanted to incorporate a hand holding tutorial to ‘show’ the players the intricacies of the game, and to make sure they know the rules of the game. The desire here was to avoid people skipping the instructions and jumping right into the game without first learning the ‘rules’.
Because our game looks like tic-tac-toe some may think the rules are the same, and our demo is set up for 2 player local - so we thought this might not be evident to some.
So the menu clearly states - demo - the button to launch the game clearly lists 1player vs 2player and the instructions clearly state the game is BEST played with two players.
But tutorials for a demo - for a game that is relatively low in complexity - IMO - is overkill - so we’ve chosen to just provide text instructions that can be read and understood (hopefully) in about 30 seconds of reading.
If players still choose to skip the instructions and attempt to play the game without knowing the rules - that is there choice. I’m more interested in people who actually are interested in the game - want to learn the simple rules so they can enjoy the game. Expecting someone to read 30 seconds of instructions isn’t too much to ask for is it?
In my experience getting people to read any amount of instructions is more of a challenge than we’d intuitively think.
The issue is that we’re invested in our project and we see something cool in our game. The people picking it up for the first time aren’t invested yet. To us it’s a no-brainer that 30 seconds of reading will allow access to a cool game. To them they open a program hoping for a cool game and instead get a wall of text of an instruction manual…
It basically boils down to there being a mismatch between the presentation and the product. Playing games is cool. Reading a manual is not. Someone is in the mood for the former but is initially met with the latter. The impact of this will vary greatly from audience to audience, so as with many things it comes down to knowing yours and figuring out how to best give them what they want.
The most ingenious form of “feedback” in-game that I’ve seen is Assassin’s Creed 4’s star ratings and “rate this mission” at the end of each main mission. Not as in-depth as questions, but it’s a definite way to glean information on what users do and don’t like, and give them a sense that they’re having an impact.
Helped me out quite alot, I actually hadn’t even thought about analytics to be honest. I think I still want to keep a feedback button though, but as you guys suggest I should perhaps just make it a button saying “feedback”.