Third Person Game Level - MSc Dissertation Game And Survey

[senor-cojones]

Hey guys,

You may remember I posted here before asking for help on an initial survey for my dissertation (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=34182), well now I'm nearing the finish of the practical element of my project and I'm looking for help again if possible. I know none of this is related to Source, but I'm hoping that in general people appreciate games, and have game creation/level design knowledge (and can offer me tips, as I know there are flaws!).

So far I've been working on a 3D Game environment with custom gameplay and HUD elements (basically making a simple full game) within the UDK and it's nearing completion as can be seen in my video;

In order to complete the making of the game I need to test it upon volunteers, who would need to download my game and then fill out a short survey for my dissertation, and that would be an amazingly great help to me.


My game is available here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20422466/DE-Woo ... WoodsA.rar

My survey is available here: http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-surve ... M_3dfa209e



The game is about 182mb in size and the survey has about 30 questions, but most are multiple choice so it should only take about 5-10mins to complete in total. If you could download my game, fill in the survey and pass around to anyone at all that would be such a great help to me (especially looking for novice game players).

The game runs mostly at a solid 60fps on my PC which is Win7 64bit, Q6600 stock and ATI HD5700, so my pc isn't great and it runs fine, and it also runs ok enough for me to record it, so hopefully it runs fine for everyone else, but if not just PM me and I'll sort something out.

If you do have any trouble running it then please try closing any unused apps like firefox/chrome/etc and also run at a lower resolution (in the settings menu try 800x600 or 640x480) and this should help in giving more frames per second.

Last thing... all art, features, concepts etc are mine except for the following;
Trendy Entertainment- for use of the horde code/enemy models/AI.
Michael Allar- for use of the Forecourse UI.
Epic Games- for use of the character/weapon models and making a great engine.

Regarding the results of the previous survey- I'm holding on to them for the moment as I'm going to use the results of this batch of testing to compare against the previous survey and I'll post results later (without names/emails/etc!).

Regarding what I'll do with the survey- well firstly I'll be using the results to most of the questions to gain an insight for my Masters dissertation, and secondly I'll be using the general opinion to help improve the level to make it have more gameplay and be fun to play in general. Suggestions so far have been to add a short intro that makes the objectives clear and explains the controls for beginners, and another has been to add moss to the cliffs/rocks and damage to the cabins to make the aesthetics more interesting, so I welcome any suggestions as I know it needs fleshing out and improving.

So yeah that's it for now. If you could play my game and fill in my survey I would be eternally grateful.

Thanks guys
Aaron

[senor-cojones]

Thanks very much for all the replies to my survey so far guys

I'm trying to analyse all results as scientifically as possible, and I'm noticing some interesting trends across the board- so far there is a very strong correlation of 0.95 (1 is the maximum/perfect) in agreement for losing track of time whilst playing games, so that's great as that's really the basics of what I'm researching for.

In order to have a high accuracy and confidence in my results I'd still very much like more people to take part in this, every little really does help!

Thanks so far, hopefully soon I'll be posting up actual results and comparisons (minus any names/private data as that is purely between you, myself and my supervisor/examiner).

[cheesemoo0]

Is there no goal other than surviving until the timer runs out?

[senor-cojones]

At the moment there isn't no. This isn't quite a final version of the level yet, so I'm looking for feedback to improve it- one of the things I've been told is that it might be a good idea to include controls/objectives/etc for people unfamiliar with the game, so I'm definitely going to look at including that