Hello everyone! Today I will be writing about player tracking and gathering level design feedback. So let’s move directly into the topic!
Gathering Player Movement / Player Tracking
When it comes to playtest, just tend to get a lot of great data, however, only relaying on the feedback from the play tester directly is not always a clever idea. So, what I decided to do was to build in a tracker system that would draw a map where the player moved. This way we would be able to look at different pictures to see how people moved around our level and solved the challenges. This in turn gave us great insight in how to redesign and reshape the level design.
The way I made it work, was to have a separate copy of the world where it was mostly the most basic layout in. Then when the player moved around I would draw in that area, when the player finished, I would simple take a screenshot of that area and store it on the computer. This way could obviously be improved by drawing directly to a picture instead of having a 3d copy of the world and draw there, however as our world was quite small and we could then gather how they moved in 3D I chose to do it that way. For future or bigger areas drawing directly to a map would give better performance though.
Here is a picture from our alpha playtest of the movement of a player who moved around the level:
As we continue gathering this type of data, we can more easily change the layout to try get a more natural flow true the level. As a simple picture of the player movement is quite valuable feedback. And before someone ask, the green and red means two different things, the green is movement in the normal dimension, while red is movement in the other dimension. (I know the colors can be inconvenient for color blind people, but seeing as no one is color blind in our group and we are only using them internally I did not see a need in fixing it).
The End!
Anyway, that’s all for me this week, be sure to leave a comment if you have any feedback or anything else to tell! Take care!
Pontus Berglund Developer Blog 