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A couple of months ago I asked for some feedback on an “alpha” version of my game, and the response was very helpful. I’m actually still folding some of that feedback into the game, and it resulted in a lot of good changes. Along the way, I decided I wanted the beginning of the game to be a lot more interesting. I decided to follow a pattern I’ve seen used before, where the player has access to a “full power” version of their character towards the beginning, only to have that power taken away, requiring it to be acquired again. This has some advantages: You immediately get a feel for the mechanics of the game, it shows where things are going, and it gives players a reason to continue playing, so they can reacquire those powers.
I realized that this kind of a “god mode” start would also make for a pretty good “demo” experience for the game. So, I built this part of the game to serve as both the actual start for the game, as well as a stand-alone “demo” level that people can play to get a sense of what Gravia’s like.
I got the demo up on Steam this week, and I’d appreciate if anyone would like to give it a try. I think it’s about a 5-10 minute experience overall. You don’t need a key or anything, the demo is freely available to all:
If you’re one of the great people who tried my “alpha” release a few months back, just be aware that it seems Steam might not show you the button for the Demo. Or, the button might not do anything when you click on it. Apparently with Steam, if you have the full game, you can’t play the Demo for the same game. Seems like a weird policy to me.
As for what I’m interested in:
Just your overall impressions, mainly related to things you feel were confusing, or didn’t work for you. Was anything confusing?
How do you feel about this being the very first thing you experience of this game? As I said, I’m planning on this “demo” to actually be the first level, to get players right into the game. Do you have any concerns about that?
Thanks. Since you played the “alpha” version before, I’m not sure you’ll actually be able to see the Demo link. Maybe if you’ve uninstalled the alpha version you’ll be able to install the demo?
hi - well, I had uninstalled the alpha and I went to the “store page”, clicked on download demo and I think the demo version (not the alpha) is downloading. Will check it out tomorrow and confirm either way
I just tried what you tried, and unfortunately it downloads the full alpha instead of the demo, even clicking on the Demo button. So, it seems that if you already have access to the Alpha, you’re not able to play the Demo. That’s a pretty weird policy on Steam’s part. But I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that. Thanks for trying, though.
Controls are intuitive. I played keyboard+mouse the first time and gamepad the second. I don’t know if you have plans for the gamepad’s right trigger, but I would have found it more comfortable to use right trigger instead of right bumper.
Controls and camera are responsive, too. No stutter or hiccups, even when I was playing around at using a black hole to clear the storage room of all the shelves of crates and boxes.
There was just the right amount of onboarding. Any more and it would have been too hand-holdy.
I like the Portal-esque meta game thing that happens at the end of the demo.
Thanks for trying it. I’m glad, and kind of surprised, you had success with a controller. The game should have full controller support, but I’m personally extremely bad at FPS games using a controller, so it’s hard for me to tell if the game is effectively playable with controller. And since you’re generally not shooting at specific enemies, I don’t think I can realistically add any kind of aim-assistance that other games often have. As for the trigger vs. bumper thing, the controls are remappable, but maybe I should make Right Trigger the default. I’d be more inclined to trust your judgment than my own in that respect.
I’m also glad you felt it was a reasonable introduction. The main goals are to make the player feel powerful at the beginning, and to mostly just let them do cool things to “hook” them and make them want to keep playing the game.
Hey @dgoyette , I’ll jot down some thoughts as I play through.
screen froze first time shooting right. did not unfreeze until i tab out of application (did not happen a second time)
music gets irritating. maybe only use it for key points and beef up ambience? or maybe something more soothing/less annoying, like ambient space genre or something. As it is, I turned it off.
bending the metal is cool. maybe give us a clue about that in previous room. A chance for people paying close attention to feel clever. Maybe very first room can have lots of things that bends and get tossed around.
I already knew how game works, but maybe a short explanation about what a rift is would be good to give right off the bat.
room where i pull self up with rift, shoot up into higher area and then immediately get sucked into another rift in center of hallway - its unclear what game is teaching me with the presence of the second rift.
room with tons of crates to mess around with - give me more of this in the beginning. just to play around with, get a feel for how rifts work without any consequence. I like making the things fly around. Its fun. I want to shoot a rift on one side, shoot a rift on the other side, and see what happens. I want to shoot ten rifts in a big circle and see what happens. Maybe if I shoot too many rifts everything just explodes? Who knows. But as a gamer, I want to do all of that.
combat isnt working for me. I dont like getting frozen when hit (by enemy). Need a dodge mechanic or something. I dont want to only move backwards.There is no distinct strategy. Just backpeddle and shoot rifts, right? I can’t say this part is fun for me. I killed first guy quickly and was fighting the other two before it auto-ended.
A few summary thoughts:
I think I still have a few critiques similar to my first time around. Training can be slowed down, give me totally consequence free playgrounds that are fun to mess around in for a good while before introducing any stakes.
I didnt face any confusion or major irritations this time around. I think pacing can be tightened up by introducing just a single concept at a time. As mentioned already I am not in love with the combat, but I did basically know what to do immediately.
Couple other notes which may be n/a for where you’re at but I mention anyway:
SFX is lacking. Result is game doesn’t feel very alive. A few layers of ambient noise, player grunts/breathing, more intense rift noises will go a long way.
Rooms are pretty bare. I dont think you need to fill with junk but maybe using hard lights and more shadow, and having the rifts add a lot to that can add more interest. You can also use lighting to subtley give player hints about where to go, what to focus on, etc.
And one more thing I mention, it was hard for me to figure it out but I think I got it:
There is like two types of gameplay. A type where I see the puzzle, I make my plan and do the puzzle at my pace. And then there is another type where things happen suddenly and I must react.
I think it is irritating for me as a gamer to not know which of those two types of gameplay I am contending with. It should be communicated clearly. That is perhaps why the room where I jump up the high wall and then suddenly get pulled into a new rift leaves me feeling irritated. Because how can I prepare for that? And nothing until that point has taught me “be ready for the unexpected” or “you’ll need lighting reflexes”. It might be realistic to get squashed by a thing you didnt know existed but it doesnt make for a palatable gaming experience IMO.
So for that room I either want to be left with a clear lesson I learned, or get some sort of communication to give me fair chance to prepare for whats ahead.
I understand your sentiment here, but I think it’s cooler to discover that on your own. It’s a puzzle game. I want to feel like I’m figuring things out on my own.
@dgoyette - Speaking of which, I would have liked additional, more challenging puzzles. Gravia is polished enough at this point that I assume you’re aiming to demo in the Steam Autumn Games Festival. If so, consider adding a little more content. Otherwise you’ll probably get complaints about how short the demo is. I worked on a game that was in the Summer Festival, and despite being maybe an hour or more of gameplay, some streamers still complained that it ended too soon – which is a good thing, in that it left them eager for more – but I think something as short as the current Gravia demo might just be frustrating.
Also, Portal has character in the form of GladOS and the dystopian setup of the test facility. I’m not saying that you should rip off that idea, but it would be nice to develop some kind of more unique character in the demo, or at least hint at it a little more.
Thanks to you both for the feedback. There’s lots of helpful stuff here. Here’s some specific questions/follow-ups (hopefully not too dense…)
It didn’t crash? It just locked up until you tabbed away and then back in? I’ll keep an eye out for that. I haven’t seen that happen before. That’s puzzling.
Good point. Right now I’m kind of using one “background” music piece all the time, so that’s understandable. It’s also not really the right tone. I’ll have some new music soon that better fits each part of the game, this level included.
The first room has a set of pipes that bend, and eventually break, as the rift deforms them. But, that may be a little too subtle. I don’t mind adding another set of pipes to that area to make it more likely that a player will notice that interesting things are happening.
Excellent point. I don’t know how that escaped me. Probably in all likelihood, any person who is sitting down to try this game will been told “you make black holes”, but it’s completely reasonable to state something explicitly along those lines.
That’s fair. The point of that part is just to give you a cool sensation of go up really quickly. The second rift is just there to make sure you don’t fall back down again. I originally let some platforms come up under your after you shot up, but that was confusing to people. But now that I think of it, I can probably put another target up above, and let the player shoot it. I can make sure it’s not too difficult, to get the shot off. That’s probably much better, even if it takes the player a couple of tries.
That’s reasonable. There’s probably no reason that necessarily has to come at the end. That room truly only exists to show off some of the visual effects, and to play around in it.
I’m a little on the fence with the combat in the demo. Combat isn’t a huge part of the full game, I just felt like it was interesting to include some of it. I intended it to be probably too hard for people, and as just a way to wrap up the demo quickly. But probably ending it with something difficult like that can give people a bad final impression. I’ll give that some more thought.
I definitely struggle with this aspect. Everything tends to feel kind of empty, and I don’t really have any “stuff” that makes sense to fill that space in with. One major concern is that if I add decorations, some people will get confused and think those decorations are part of the puzzle/challenge, instead of thinking they’re just decoration. I’m still not sure the best way to approach this sort of thing, but it’s on my list of “polishing” tasks, to find more ways to bring the environments to life. Definitely still something I have trouble with.
That’s on the list, too, and it’s a common complaint. I’ll be tightening up the controls in the very near future.
That’s a very interesting point, and I’ve honestly not considered it before. Gravia’s a blend of puzzles and action experiences, usually with each “level” being mostly one or the other. It’s definitely the case that people don’t usually know, at first glance, whether the challenge in a particular level requires clever problem solving, or mostly just good platforming/timing. It’s possible that just figuring that out could be part of the enjoyment for some people. But I’ve definitely seem people’s first impressions be wrong, and they approach certain challenges the wrong way because they think it’s a puzzle, and not a platforming experience, or vice versa.
I’ll give this some more thought about whether to try to broadcast what’s expected from the player in each level. My first thought was that it could be some subtle queue, like changing the music depending on the type of challenge, but not everyone even keeps the music on. Maybe there could be a subtle color scheme difference, I’m not sure. Definitely something interesting to think about.
Yeah, I agree with you on that. I struggled to think of some puzzle ideas that really made sense for the Demo experience. Since it’s the first level of the game, and players can’t be expected to have any real clue what’s going on yet, having puzzles this early felt a little cheap. On the other hand, Gravia really is a puzzle game, and that should be an impression people walk away with from playing the demo. Thanks for encouraging me to think about that again. I really should get a reasonable puzzle experience in here.
Yeah, I’m planning to have this in the upcoming Steam Demo event. I was mostly designing the demo to run for 5-10 minutes, expecting that would be a good length for live events, like game conventions, so that enough people would have a chance to play through it. I only more recently found out about the Steam thing. I’m not sure what the right amount of content would be, but I definitely have concerns about having too much stuff, such that people feel like there’s not reason to play the full game anymore. I’m sure that balance is hard to strike. But I definitely think a bit of additional experiences in the demo make sense.
That’s a good point. I was holding off on any character introductions until immediately after this experience, since it seemed most people playing a demo won’t care about the storyline of the full game. But having one character in here could make it more memorable.
Okay, thanks again, both of your. Plenty of tweaks to make now.
@dgoyette Had a play, you’ve got a really cool concept there and the level design/atmosphere is very well done.
The music is a little bit dramatic for the tutorial I think. Something a bit softer but still a little eerie would fit better.
The main issue I had was with the movement. It didn’t feel very snappy and responsive which is something that’s important for a game like this where I imagine timing and accuracy will be very important.
Is there any reason you chose left click for both fire and cancel? In the battle I kept accidentally clicking too many times and messing myself up. Possibly right click to cancel would solve this? Unless you had something else in mind for right click.
Really good work, keep it up and I look forward to seeing where you take this
I’ve put up a new build on itch for my game SpaceCraft.
It’s a 2d space ship builder, exploration and combat game.
I’d appreciate it if someone could give it a go and answer these questions.
What did you like?
What didn’t you like?
What did you wish there was more of?
What did you wish there was less of?
How long did you play?
Are there any features you expected to see that weren’t there?
Can you post a picture of your ship? (if you customized it)
Describe your combat experience (if you had one)
Did you encounter any bugs? (details)
Before you play:
The tutorial is very short - don’t be discouraged
If you’ve played before, click the “HARD RESET” button on the Main Menu - the old save files might cause issues
When you get to the part of the tutorial where you add the laser, you might have to click the Crosshair (offense) button first to show the laser (Don’t know why, only seems to happen in WebGL).
hi @dgoyette I tried out the demo, I definitely think getting the full glove in early is a more exciting intro to the game and likely to be a better way to grasp the players attention (and whet the appetite as a demo). I like the glove model - looks really cool! I played with controller this time and everything worked well. I agree with the comment above regards sounds I agree a bit more foley might be helpful (footsteps, grunts etc). There are quite a few good resources online and as I am working on sound myself at the moment here are some places to look:
The asset store also has a number of free bundles as well. Note that quite often authors list on multiple sites so for example some of the kits on the asset store are also on sounds etc. Price can vary!
I didn’t specifically mean an actual entity in the game. By “character,” I mean a unique spin on the setting and story. Portal has a dystopian training center with a mystery about why there aren’t any other people and why it’s run by an automated system run amok. Currently, Gravia is just a bunch of rooms with puzzles. Is there anything more to the setting or backstory?
