HELP - Come play my game!

[Morph Bark]

Hello! I'm a first-year student of Game Design & Production and I am part of a team that is working on the game Bumper Kars [working title] as a student project.

Bumper Kars is a game reminiscent of hardcore platformers, but unique in its own right. You play as a bumper car that bounces around a neon-filled city as part of a deadly TV show. You need to avoid deadly spikes and moving hazards to make it out alive.

As part of this project, we also need to do some playtesting, and that's where I need some help with: because I need playtesters! To take part, simply click the link below. It will involve answering some questions before and after playing the game. Answering the questions shouldn't take more than 10 minutes, and playing the game should take about 10 minutes as well (though I certainly won't stop you if you wish to play more!).

GO!

The gameplay is mostly finished, but we think it may still require some tweaking to be even better. The art assets and sound files aren't all done and implemented yet, as we're currently in our Alpha stage, but the artists and our sound wizard are working hard to finish all of that up.

For our testing here, we're mostly looking for qualitative data: what do people think of the game? What opinions do they have of its style? Do they consider it as fun as we do? Is it considered too hard or too easy?

One of our programmers is working on a way to collect all the hard data from other people playing the game in an easy way, but since he needs to do all that on his own time, that has not yet been finished.

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

Are you interested in input on this thread, or simply on the survey in question?

[Morph Bark]

If you have anything to add, feel free to respond in this thread! The survey itself is of course rather limited in what it asks about, so any further input you might have (on either the game or the survey) would help a lot.

[Djinn_in_Tonic]

If you have anything to add, feel free to respond in this thread! The survey itself is of course rather limited in what it asks about, so any further input you might have (on either the game or the survey) would help a lot.

The biggest one, right off the bat, is a way to pan across the level and view it before beginning. It was really frustrating to die due to picking the wrong angle to go somewhere I didn't know the terrain of, and this happened frequently.

It was especially painful on maps like Boss Introduction 1, where the terrain suddenly shifts without prior warning. It felt less like a game of skill, and more like a grind to get the perfect angles in time. I feel like the game would benefit from checkpoints for some of the longer levels, perhaps.

[SamBurke]

I was unable to play due to it being windows only, but I completed the survey anyway. Apologies for my slightly snarky answers on it, but I hope the data helps as some sort of a baseline.

[Fri]

I just did the survey. Pretty cool game.

[Knaight]

I quite liked it, controls aside.

[Iruka]

The game won't run. Can't find the data folder even though ii is correctly named.

[Morph Bark]

Thanks for the feedback everyone! We've had a couple of playtests with students at our school and at a local bar, and it seems a lot of the feedback from those align with our results from this open beta test. So thank you!

The game won't run. Can't find the data folder even though ii is correctly named.

Do you perhaps have a Mac? One person's response on the survey was that the game didn't run because it apparently doesn't work with a Mac.

If that is not the problem, I can ask one of our programmers, who probably has a better idea of what might be wrong than I do.

[Iruka]

Do you perhaps have a Mac? One person's response on the survey was that the game didn't run because it apparently doesn't work with a Mac.

If that is not the problem, I can ask one of our programmers, who probably has a better idea of what might be wrong than I do.

Nope, Dell notebook with Windows 8.

[Knaight]

Nope, Dell notebook with Windows 8.

I also had issues, also complements of Windows 8. Moving the files to a folder named the same thing as the files solved the issue completely.