Discovering how nobody understands your game and maybe fixing it

The design goal

One of the design goals for this project is to make a dice rolling roguelite along the lines of the amazing Slice & Dice, but with a non-combat theme, because everything is about combat in games and I don't find exploration of that space engaging.

The prototype goal

Discover if the current game concept is engaging, so I don't sink time making something that is not interesting to players.|
So how did it go?

Initial launch result was miserable

I launched the prototype as a part of a small local Latvian competition but it failed to land in the top three which may not indicate much about the quality of the game, but definitely tells something about the lack of the initial engagement.

I had added minimalist telemetry and the gathered data revealed an important insight out of 26 players who had tried this during the first 7 days only 4 had finished the tutorial successfully. To confirm it I ran a few in-person playtests which confirmed that there were quite a few confusing things in the game which made it incomprehensible.

Improving things

During playtests I had identified the following problems:

1. Players don't understand that this is a dice game and struggle to parse the dice side iconography

Current fix - Ernest made for me a 2D dice rolling animation and I implemented a new complex icon for various effects with text below it. This was quite a struggle, but I am happy how it turned out.

2. Players assume each character can be assigned only to "their own building".

Current fix - when starting dragging highlight active spaces in which you can drop a character.

3. Players don't understand that dice with work, contributes to project progress.

Current fix - introduced a resource flying animation after assignment of the character which fills up the bar.

4. Players don't understand that they earn money or influence with activated die.

Current fix - the same flying animations of resources to the corresponding resource bars. Also much more pronounced resource indicators for influence and money. 

5. Players don't understand the concept that you finish an experience for the guest at a building and then a guest visits it and gets satisfaction.

Current fix - Ernest created custom short animations that show the ending result, then a guest visits the building and gets the satisfaction as a sequence of animated events.

6. Players struggle to discern buttons from non-interactive panels.

Current fix - introduce a clear visual language for all clickable buttons.

I made lots of smaller updates (changes in the layout, better upgrade visualization for dice sides, reduced color count for clarity), but their effect probably will not be that big.

Nonetheless there are still loads of issues with the game, for example players struggle to understand that an expensive building requires you to both fill work bar and press pay button when you have enough money, which perhaps means that it is confusing design. Or the fact that when using a die side which requires you to pay some work, if you use it on 0 work building, the die side will give you nothing. This could be improved with mouseover predicted outcome hinting.

But at the moment I want to see if these changes improve clarity of the game and more people are able to finish the tutorial. Then the next challenge is figuring out if they are interested in what is going on in the game.

Conclusion

I've always regarded myself as a more of a front-end person, but to my surprise I struggled a lot figuring out and making these changes. Not sure if its because dealing with Godot Control node hieararchies and their resizing is tough or I have migrated more to enjoying "back-end" work in game dev where you focus on game logic and sometimes it feels like you are getting much more done.

Overall I am not satisfied with the current visuals, because though the animations clearly highlight relationships between elements in the game, they are slow and make the game sluggish to play. So if I continue with this project, this will be changed to some different solution.