Feedback on my game please!

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1

Hey there, just finished my psychological (slight) horror / mystery game and I would love some feedback. It’s a slow-burn rather atmospheric one, no quick jumpscares. If that’s not your genre, no worries. Just flagging so you don’t expect something else.

I’m deliberately NOT explaining the game here. Real players will only see the icon/title and won’t read a description, so I want to know if the onboarding works with zero context, same as they’d get it.

Dead Air | Play on Roblox
I’m not asking you to play the full game, here’s what I want to know:

  • Did the first few minutes make sense, or did you feel lost/confused in a bad way?
  • Would you have kept playing, or bounced out of boredom/frustration, and if so, around when and why?
  • Anything that broke onboarding or engagement

If you flag something, a quick “nice to have” vs “this actually hurts the onboarding / engagement” tag would help me prioritize, but don’t stress the format, just tell me what you felt.

Thank you for your time :slight_smile:

If you want to stick around, you can check the game page for the dc server invite.

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I really like the feeling on the game and it obviously carries some inspiration from Survive 99 Nights and The Isle. The game is really worthy of appearing on the Front Page. The game machanics are well done. I wasn’t really able to finish the game because of my poor knowledge and terrible survival skills lol.

Initial Thoughts

  • The Lobby and Map its self is a well done, I have to give it to you.

  • The cutscene is REALLY well done, and sets the scene very well.

  • The UI is simple but because of its ‘semi-realism’ it doesn’t stray too far away from the general feeling of the game.

  • The game mechanics are fairly simple to understand and leaves the player to adventure alone - which is a good tactic for Retention (Player’s coming back after thier first session) and proves for some good potential for high CCU.

Plot

The plot it’s self is also self-explanatory but I do have a few questions..

  • Where do the skin-walkers come from, is this a special island of skin-walkers?

  • Is the guy the guy that ‘rescues’ us possibly another one of those ‘Skin Walkers?’

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  • Is Nora (if im not wrong) para-social or mentally-attached to us from the 17 missed calls or is she in danger? The way she speaks to us doesn’t really tell much.

Basic Gameplay

I was acutally so lost when I appeared out of no where, and it told me to get back to the cabin :sob:

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I died to these guys seconds later btw..

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This is actually so scary lol, I touched one at the oil rig and is eyes turned white. Bro I ran but he still ate my ahh :sob:

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Concerns?

  • From the 2 Revives i bought if you couldn’t tell :sob:, It’s actually quite hard to survive if atleast one of your cabin’s windows breaks down and its pretty much game over.

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  • The holding mini-game is not clear at all and is quite difficult to understand.

  • Day-time in my opinion is too short, despite having to adventure the huge map and return back to the cabin.

Edge-cases/Bugs?

  • I only experienced one possible bug, but this may have occurred because I bought a revive. I couldn’t fill my empty fuel canister? it said it required an empty one which I did but there was no way to interact with it?

Improvements?

  • There should be a feature that maps out parts of the map the player discovers per every land-mark, and it should be a literal map of where the cabin is but it shouldn’t show where the player currently is when using it to make the game abit more challenging.

  • The holding mini-game should be a DBD like Skill-Check or any other reasonable skill check that either best fits the platform the user is on or all platforms, a simple one would rather be mini-game whereby buttons appear on your screen and you have to click them within time, however with controller players a simple button mashing min-game whereby you have to press 4 buttons like the X, A, B and Y buttons correctly.

  • There should be a method or tool to defend your-self against the Skin Walkers, like some spiritual ghost or ritual to deter them or something or just straight up weapons or machete’s.

  • There should be a pop-up or timer on the side to tell you when the Speed Drink wears off.

  • Have a way for the player to repair the cabin, but give them a downside to such a repair like cutting trees, there should also be like a “Window Repair Workbench” which requires materials from the map but not just wood, and it obviously should become more scarce as the player repairs the windows, so like all the stone I’ve seen should have a purpose, but a very limited one to encourage the player to survive via skill.

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Hi! I’ve just played this game, and I’m at a loss for words…I LOVE IT SO FAR!

Although I didn’t get to finish it, as I died when I got surrounded by the NPCs. It was amazing and created the actual sense of loneliness. (I did play solo, but I feel the lack of help/guidance really elevated the experience of being trapped on an island). I feel this quality of the game separates it from the other story-type games on Roblox.

Maybe if you were aiming for younger audiences, I would probably recommend adding some guidance, e.g Hints, only at request maybe. Some parts, such as finding how to turn on the power, where to get fuel, how to get to the radio tower, etc may be harder for younger audiences. Maybe cutscenes directing the player’s sight to the objective (e.g power lines, or the map), could help. Yet again, I feel this should maybe be given to players who ask for hints. Also, more visible paths could help with this too.

I would have definitely kept on playing (but I did kind of rage after I died). I feel that I will invite my friends to play with me in the future, as this game was genuinely so good.

Nothing explicitly broke onboarding/engagement for me, however a few things did stick out. I noticed that the power pylons were sort of floating, and some signs that were maybe misplaced?

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I feel the signs should have been the other way round.

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Also, you can see in this image, that the sprint button overlaps with the jump button slightly on mobile (I was playing on iPad 11” M4).

Lastly, I think that the little minigame at the window defending could be moved into the middle of the screen instead at the bottom. It could maybe make it easier to understand what to do.

Overall, nothing really pushed me away from this game, I think that just nicer attention to details across the map could really increase the environment to match the experience. I will definitely be back to play with friends, and thank you for bringing me to this amazing experience!

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Wow man, you took a lot of time for this, I appreciate it <3, let me go through your feedback:

Plot:
You said you have questions like “Where do the skinwalkers come from?”, “is Nora para-social/mentally-attached or is she in danger?”. Are these questions that genuinely need to be answered right now or is that the type of question you would carry throughout the game that keeps you curious?

Gameplay:
You said you were lost and got slashed by one of the monsters. Have you entered the cabin before? That creats a marker visible over the entire map. Did that help? Did you even notice it? It shows up after discovering the cabin, which is the first place you are supposed to go to.

My game is supposed to have a strong learning curve. You are supposed to fail a few times and with each death, you learn something new. I like to compare it to DOORS. You fail a few times, you learn rules, entities and knowledge is your progression. Does my game do this well or did you just feel confused / frustrated?

Concerns
Oh my god you actually spent robux, want me to refund them? I appreciate your effort in testing. Truly, thanks a lot!
Yea I gotta stop selling revives if the window is broken. There was a “Revive All + Repair Cabin” option but that wasn’t enough of a sign that Revive alone won’t help you long. Quick question, when you bought revive: was the window broken already or was the monster mid - smashing and broke it after you revived?
The defend window mini-game, thanks for pointing it out. I’m gonna have to take a look at how to make this more plausible. Did you understand it by now or still no clue how it works? Anything that would have helped you?
How much daytime would you have needed? 1.5x the time? Double day lenght? I wanna preserve the night mechanic, I love how you have to defend the window.

About the empty fuel can bug, you were holding the “Empty fuel can” next to the tank and it wouldn’t allow you to fill it? Was the countdown maybe still active? Theres a countdown above the refill station / tank that goes down, only then you can refuel. Either way, I’ll look into it.

Improvements
Are these suggestions that are “nice to have” or would they genuinely contribute a lot of value to the game? The Skin Walkers are not supposed to be attacked. I purposely made the player feel “Oh shoot I gotta run to the cabin asap”. Do you think I can stick to this or is a stun mechanic a must have?

You truly helped me a lot with your feedback, thank you so much man :slight_smile:

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Hey man, thanks a lot for your feedback, let me go through it:

You said you raged after dying to the NPCs. My game is supposed to have a strong learning curve. You are supposed to die a few times and with each time you learn new rules. Knowledge = Progression. I like to compare my game to DOORS in that way. You die to a new entity, you learn how it works and you replay. When you say you raged, did you actually feel like you could avoid this kind of mistake next time? Or were you rather frustrated and didn’t want to continue? (You said you raged but also that you would have kept playing, just pushing back here because this moment is very important for me).

Truly appreciate your time, thanks mate :slight_smile:

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Yes, I agree with the idea that Progression = Knowledge! What I mean when I ‘raged’ was that I just stopped playing as I needed a break. Don’t worry, it’s not the game, it’s me.

And of course I will be back, I feel that I wanted to experience the game with my friends too!

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Just curious.

Yeah I noticed, and knew but I was either too slow or I just died because of the mini-game you had to do to prevent them from breaking through the window.

I did feel abit confused but If the intention was to learn the more you progress then yeah it makes sense.

No, lol its only like 30 robux anyway.

When one broke through, All of them transformed and went through the window and killed me. Then I bought a revive.

I’d probably say the biggest issue was that there was no clear indication, until I realised I was supposed to press the buttons and the bottom, but it was in such shock i just spammed and i found health bar red and accepted my fate.

Even if the ui for that was in the centre of the screen it would’ve clearly show that the player had to do.

Night time is 1:30 right?, so I think it would be understandable for it to be atleast 6-8:00 of daytime.

I was interrupted by a skin-walker as I mentioned before so I didn’t really check for that.

I mean It would be a nice thing to have, just to reduce your chances of dying quickly as you progress. And also, the sun moves as it gets darker throughout the day right? if so then I think its fine..

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I found some methods of avoiding these guys buy they’re kinda unethical, and either way I couldn’t get them to stop, and I need to keep it humming? Either way, I still think that there should be some sort of navigation for the player, even a compass makes life a little easier.

This was a recent attempt I did, with another fail…

I’m going to complete this game either way..

nvm i give up..

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If I’m not mistaken, I thought the RIM thing acted as a navigation tool during and after the radio tower part. There’s little dots showing you where the interferences are (direction-wise). I’m not sure cuz I did die at that part too…

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So like, I was escaping, but now I’m just soft-locked, idk what happened but I was holding the RIM, so possibly something could’ve happened? I cant tell if this is a client or server issue but nothing comes up on the client.

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I definitely love it so far. I didn’t feel confused at all really, the current guide in the game feels well enough.

I would have kept playing, but I think right now it feels a lot more like a walking simulator instead of doing meaningful things often. I get that this kind of game is obviously going to be like that and be prone to it, but still.

Something I thought would be nice would be to have the bottom left menu start open instead of closed, and to make the buttons within it larger. Potentially having them connected to a key bind too would be nice.

Overall not bad I’d like to see what happens with this game in the future.

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What the hell? I’ve never seen anything like this. The meshes aren’t even loaded correctly, the rig with the green highlight isn’t even supposed to be blocky. Did the cutscene play? What exactly happened there, you just walked into this guy with the RIM and this happened?

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The walking sim is probably the biggest ongoing challenge, any idea what could’ve helped you at that specific moment to stay hooked? Was it the exploration in general that wasn’t exciting or the objectives telling you to go from place to place?

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Don’t take this as a 100% answer, but this may be to do with an active bug causing the deloading of objects and sounds or failure to load at all. (@Sproons)

See here:

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I think its in general the exploration not being that exciting. I do like the map design so far, but there isn’t a lot of variety that is causing me to think of how I actually want to get toward wherever I am trying to go. Having elements in the map that require the player to be forced to choose a certain direction to go between multiple directions, obstacles that the player either needs to navigate around or use as parkour, anything that just makes the player need to think about where they are going instead of just mindlessly walking into the direction of the next objective…

Along with that, adding ways to get to destinations quicker may be good. A stretch, maybe, but if you end up adding fall damage, something like zip-lines could be quite nice for players to get down from high places without having to spend mind numbing time going back down the same path they came.

2 Likes