Peer testing notes / findings / suggestion etc

[Peer]

I had already guessed that this might be due to technical reasons. It was just an observation, and it is perfectly fine for me if you say “no” to everyting. I just wanted to avoid that later on you go “oh, why didn’t any of the testers spot this” 😉

Same goes for what I wrote regarding what happens to the ship’s configuration after death. Actually, I like the way VectorBlade currently handles this (despite the trouble I still have with the queen). It adds to the challenge of the game. You really have to watch out not to die.

Video games have funny concepts after all. You have more than just one life! It’s not like that in the real world. Well, except if you are Dr. Who 😉

I did some quick research here. The whole thing of having more than one life was introduced in the very early arcade games to keep the player hooked to the machine, inserting quarters. If you had just one life in the game, less potential players would invested a quarter. If you had lives in abundance, the games would go on for too long, and the machine would make less money. They did some studies back then, and the result was that approximately three lives is the best compromise for attracting players while still keeping the games short enough. The game’s difficulty is closely related to this.

Other weird things in video games: In Scramble, you have to blow up fuel tanks in order to refuel your own ship. Doesn’t really make sense 😉

[Peer]

Beta 23 (no-buzz Vectrex), some observations:

– During first time calibration, in the initial menu saying “Is this Vectrex a so called …”, in the lower part of the screen the line “no buzz” Vectrex appears twice (for no obvious reason).

– Rectangle calibration help text: I think the part “(scale $80 max)” is irrelevant for the normal player. Leave it out and save some bytes 😉

– Swarm helper help text: “This little fellow (no comma here) is one swarm element (of instead of from?) …”, would save another 2 bytes

– “It will never be displayed perfectly, (no linebreaks here), but you can cho(o)se…”, sorry here one more byte is needed

– Regarding the message of the “Reset” sub-menu: Why is there a blank line between “Calibrations” and “Achievements”?

– When selecting “Reset” from the tools menu, I think it would be better to go back completely to the “very initial calibration” procedure (if that is possible at all). Otherwise the tools menu can look so contorted that (for a less experienced user) it is hard to find the “Calibrate” option again.

[Malban]

Thx for the checking… will do all of the above…

[Author]

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