There were nine responses to this survey.
Overall, everyone said that the aim of the game was clear, and had no or very little trouble figuring out what to do. Four out of the nine commented without prompt that they liked the art style. One person seemed to have trouble with the shooter, and someone else had trouble with finding the ‘play game’ button – may be some minor issue with screen size?
Multiple instances of people finding the kanji being hard to learn and recognise to begin with – more focus should be given to the introduction of symbols and kanji to make the learning curve not so steep. Perhaps start the symbols off in colour, or with English words beneath, and then adjust after a few rounds.
Other things to adapt:
– make the pointer shorter
– slingshot physics like Angry Birds (I’ll probably say no to this one, as the point is to connect the symbols to the kanji faster and this would simply make the game more difficult)
– groups of same symbol should die together
– kanji no longer spawns if there is no symbol instance of it on screen
– symbols drop if not connected by anything above
– confusion over health bar, drains too fast and can keep playing after empty.
So most of these I was planning on doing anyway, they just involve more complicated code structure so I didn’t get around to it. It’s good to see suggestions of these things, though. Considering the health – well, it’s not health, it’s just score, so perhaps simply putting in a timer and then giving a star mark at the end would be more appropriate/less confusing. I’ll see if I can set that up for the next prototype.
So, I didn’t get any great revelations, but all in all a successful first test. I’ll work on those things and the introduction of kanji, and then maybe contact someone to see if I can find a person willing to speak the words for me (hopefully native).
HEX kanji 