Playtest Impressions

During the first scheduled playtesting session, the state of the game was rougher than I would have liked. For one, there was no AI present yet, therefore there was no competition to play against. Furthermore, and perhaps more noteworthy, the trail system was also not working as intended. More accurately, it was not finalized in its design, and still had a few bugs to work out.

According to player feedback, they saw the potential of the game being enjoyable, but clearly (and for good reason) did not have fun with the game. I attribute this to the lack of many key components still, so I'm not sweating too much over this.

They agree that the basic controls of WSAD to move were intuitive, as they are standard to many PC games today. The one qualm they had was the auto-run feature, which was not apparent to them during gameplay. This will be worked on.

As stated before, due to the unfinished nature of the game, the player did not really know what to do with themselves other than run around aimlessly. At first they created their own objective by running around the canvas and making shapes with their trail, however the appeal was lost shortly. This, again, will be addressed as development continues.

I think the main take away gained from this playtest was that the development process needs to be kicked into overdrive. In order for the game to have any appeal beyond the first few seconds (if that), the full core of the game must be realized.