Feedback in the Eyes of Other Developers

Help and Feedback Game Design Support
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Hey, I don’t usually ask for feedback here, but I thought it’d be useful in this case. I’m sure everyone will agree that thinking about your own game from an objective perspective can be hard, given that you’re the one that made it.

I’m asking for feedback on my new game that we made in about two months. Specifically:

  • What could we do to increase engagement? Retention?

  • What can we do to make the game more fun in general (on a per-round basis)?

  • Increase the play time for new players (aka making the new player experience better)

The game is a very wacky physics-based boat combat game. You spawn in and attack other players, making use of the destructive damage system.

Here’s the game:
https://www.roblox.com/games/7692381824/Floaty-Boats-Alpha

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I have played the game just a little bit, the game is great!

I liked the boats, the guns, and the UI, you have done a great job on this game, and I hope you keep making it!

I hope this helped :slight_smile:

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First off, what an amazing game!

This might just be me, but I’m a huge fan of fast paced combat. I think the default ship should have faster paced combat.

For reference, the sting ray is a sniper and has a 15 second mag reload (its the default). The other starter ship is the sail fish, which is a melee battle ram ship.

This kind of goes into retention too, but I think your starter ships should be incredibly easy to use. It’s not by coincidence that most FPS games start their players off with AKs and other weapons with high fire rates and versatile ranges. The string ray, while pretty OP, isn’t very intuitive. It’s gun isn’t very responsive and it has a long reload.

I think making the default ship some sort of rapid* fire ship with a responsive turret would be good (even if you make it not nearly as good as the other starter ships).
* like ~6 rounds ~3 second mag reload

Another thing I saw in game, new players don’t like being stuck with no moving parts.

For example, I hit someone’s motor and gun, so they were basically a sitting duck. I couldn’t attack them though, since I lost my ram and was waiting on a 15 second reload. The player left before the reload was done.

I think that when a player’s ship has lost all of it’s active parts (motors, guns, etc) a UI should pop up asking the player if they’d like to respawn (or just some text telling them the key to respawn)(especially for new players).

Just to reiterate though, your game is absolutely amazing! The UI is incredibly well done and animated so smoothly. The controls and general physics work really well too. Your game has a ton of potential.

Edit:
Something else, I think starting players off with enough credits to buy something (or, maybe even better, be close to buying something) is a good idea too.

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The game’s great. I like the concept and think if you invest a good amount of ROBUX into it it will be fairly popular.

The only thing I’m a bit confused about is the boats. Are players supposed to upgrade to pre-built models or do players get to design their own?

If it’s the first part, then I would recommend working on upgrading the boat design. It’s not terrible, but it’s a bit on the basic side. If it’s the latter then I think their great boat base designs but I didn’t see a “Design” button so not sure about that part.

I think with a bit more detailing on the boats the game will do quite well.

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@PersonifiedPizza
Thank you for your thoughtful feedback.

When your gun is disabled, a UI does come up on the screen letting you know that your gun is disabled. We’re going to add a sound for it soon. I think it would also be a good idea to add some sort of notification that you can press C to reset if that happens like you said. I’ll see what I can do about doing that for the paddles as well.

We did also recently lower the reload time of the Stingray because other people were saying the same thing you were. Part of why we’re testing is to gather feedback like this so that we can know if the starting boats are boring. I can definitely give the Stingray a greater clip size and faster reload, but decrease its damage to start.

@ComplicatedParadigm
We’ve actually had multiple players confused on the same thing you are. Just asking, what gave you the impression that you could design your own boat? Other players have said the thumbnails gave them that impression because the boats kind of look player designed. We want to decrease the chance that new players will be under this impression.

And no, you can’t design your own boat, but you can customize the ones you have. You can equip various equipments that change aspects of your boat, as well as your reticle. In the future we’re going to add 3D paddle skins.

As for the design of the boats, they look like that because of a design choice. We originally made this game as part of a game jam thing, but we decided to extend it into a fully fledged project. The boats were supposed to look like the boats in the very first version of Floaty Boats that I made back in 2018. I do agree, some more detail that doesn’t necessarily add any more armor would be very beneficial and help set the mood more.

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For me it was mostly the simplicity of the boats. It just looks a lot like a “base model” that you’d customize, mostly because it’s a bit blockier than most boats so it has a LEGO-ish feel to it.

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