For a good few years now, around, and most often on, New Year's Eve, either we make the pilgrimage to a mate's house who lives near the beach, or they make a pilgrimage to our house and we spend a lovely new year's eve and following new years day chilling out and relaxing. He's also my go-to-with-random-code-question guy, who has a great high level understanding of applications and many programming structures and concepts. Interestingly, he's not a gamer. At all. So I've very much been looking forward to having him test the app (and he's been quite keen to see this project finally in a playable state) so, this time round, I'd added him to the closed users list, and he installed and started playing.
It was also the first time that I was able to observe how someone uses the app, what they do, what's intuitive, and needs work and so on. I'll add, with a grain of salt, that as he's not a gamer, and not an RPG gamer - some things that might seem obvious to you, or most folks in the target audience, might be completely unknown, but for some things, that also doesn't matter at all.
So, my first thought, was that the tutorial was WAY too wordy. And long. And honestly, a bit junk. So I'll revisit that and improve. Secondly, the movement seemed a bit funny. I'm not sure if it's purely a non-gamer thing, but perhaps I need to look at alternate methods of moving the party at some point - currently the player, outside of combat, will simply try to walk to where you are touching the screen. I might need to implement a "tap-to-go" system as well, so you can just tap the screen and your avatar will get there.
Probably the biggest insight I had as he was playing, was that when in combat, things were too difficult to see. I've for ages had names and health appear under a creature or character - but it's never been quite correctly aligned. And the models were quite small. So, there was a big call-out to tweak that.
And, we were getting a bit too lost behind trees. So... that needed a fix too.
So, here we are. I've tweaked the code so that when in combat, things zoom in nicely - which actually makes all the characters and monsters look a LOT better, but it also makes what's going on seem much more obvious. I also spent the time to work out why the text wasn't aligning nicely and fixed that. Oh, and lastly, I did a small improvement so that if your avatar walks behind a tree (or anything else that obscures them) it will make that slightly transparent so you can see what's what. That also applies to the active character or monster in combat. It's better.
So, while I always had ideas that I wanted fights in a forest, with foliage and stuff to me visually harder, to simulate the lack of visibility by literally making things harder to see and such, it was a bit too annoying. I think this current approach straddles both playable and challenging in an improved way.
Now, all this is leading to a few things in my next build for testers. First, obviously all the stuff I just talked about. Secondly, I've jiggered the code where it needed to be much more agile (like being able to change the scale of terrain being drawn on the fly) which is going to also let me do things like let preferences be set. You want to zoom further out? Sure. You need better performance or have visual impairment, and want to zoom in? Got y ou covered. Same for text sizes and so on. User-Preferences was always going to get done "eventually" but I guess, "eventually" is now.
