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Memody: Sindrel Song Testing - Week 2 - Is this fun??

5 years ago2,743 words

Testing for Memody: Sindrel Song has been underway for over two weeks now, and some of the testers have finished the game. Yay! I've been doing a lot to improve the experience based on feedback - most notably adding features to address difficulty concerns - but I still have some big concerns. Most importantly, is the game actually fun?

Personally, I do enjoy it a lot. But obviously my experience with it has been very different to what a player would get. The features evolved over time, with things like difficulty or progression tracking added long after I'd mastered playing the songs myself (I think when I mastered Remedy's and Hammer's, it didn't even have note visuals!), and every time I played a song I was also editing it for any errors so I had to quit multiple times for that. Development is all about testing and re-testing and re-testing again though - I've done almost everything in Sindrel Song hundreds of times by now - so I suppose I've had to develop a mentality for that. Plus it's my pet project, and there's the satisfaction of "I made this!" about it all, so of course that's going to massively affect my motivation for it!

Something that I've thought often while playing was that this might be the first game I've made where I genuinely enjoy the gameplay in and of itself. With the RPGs I've made, I wouldn't describe their gameplay as inherently 'fun' really; I willingly did it, but generally in pursuit of a goal, to get to the next bit of story, and I wouldn't sit down just to spend time having random battles or whatever. I can't remember any RPG where that's been the case for me, actually; I've never thought "gee, I'd sure like to spend an hour just grinding battles, that'd be fun!". I suppose it was always about progressing the story with those, with the battles as a necessary obstacle to somewhat reluctantly overcome. I've made some platformers as well (something I rarely remember), where the relative fluency of movement was more essentially fun, but they they were quite rudimentary so there were limits to that.

With Sindrel Song, I suppose it's not entirely different to playing a musical instrument? People sit down and do that for fun, don't they? I 'play the piano', except I don't, really. I have a piano, and I started 'learning' when I was like 16, but if I were to sit down and play a piece, I'd be unable to. This has been a source of frustration for many many years, and I've tried to learn many times, but it takes so long and so much grinding practice that I've never achieved a level of easy competence that lets me just sit down and play my favourite pieces without much effort. I can't play anything I've composed! Well, not a full piece anyway, just fragments. I only had a handful of formal lessons right at the start and never did grading exams, so I didn't have a steady skill progression; I just dove into way-too-complicated pieces as soon as I could, stumbling stiltedly through them and generally giving up before mastering any because it was taking too many tries to get right. Now my playing is horribly sloppy and my patience low; I'd go back and redo that if I could.

Because of that, I can understand the frustration someone might feel about Sindrel Song's gameplay. While there might be some fun of fluency somewhere down the line, you have to endure some not-massively-rewarding toil before you get there. But I'd also say it's considerably easier to learn the mechanics of this game than it is to learn how to play an actual instrument, and there's a progression of complexity that should ideally allow a player to move from fairly simple stuff to fairly complicated stuff in a fairly short period of time. A thought I've had a few times is that even though I can't play the piano properly, so I can't sit down at the one behind me and play some music when I'd like to, I can play Sindrel Song, so I can go through the pieces in this - in a very easily accessible repertoire - and feel the flow of performance while doing so. I end up redoing Vivace's and Course's songs - my personal favourites - probably every day at least once. I don't have to for any reason, but I want to! I enjoy it!

I wish there were more songs actually, and if this game does okay, I'll be happy to make a sequel with the same general mechanics but with an extended repertoire.

I've been wondering actually whether some way of addressing some of the concerns would be to smooth the difficulty curve even further. Yesterday, I made some major changes to Dolour's song - the first time I've made a big edit to any of the songs, actually - to make it less challenging and to better fit with Dolour's personality. All the songs were made up as I went along, so the first bits of Dolour's - storms of notes in difficult patterns - were my attempts to figure out what to do with it. Going back and redoing those bits with a better understanding of the character felt really nice, and notably I've been wanting to play through this new version of his song a bunch of times and have to stop myself from spending too much time doing that! (I want to do it right now, actually... I'll wait until after I've posted this, I SUPPOSE, UGH.)

So I wondered whether I could do what most rhythm games do, and add multiple songs to each wintrel. Instead of just finishing their one song and moving onto the next stage, each one could have two or maybe three progressively more complicated songs. This would kind of address the issue of dividing songs into 'chunks' that some people suggested. The first ones would introduce melodies and techniques that would be woven into the final piece (which would be their song as it is currently), meaning the player would be more prepared for it when they got there. With Vivace, for example, there's a bit in her song that goes "I'm here to hear this rainbow" (or something), and it stands out as more difficult than the rest of her song. Perhaps, then, her second song could be based entirely around developing that melody more slowly, so when it comes up in the final song, it's a callback to what you'd already learned? There could be more dialogue between songs too, meaning you'd be spending more time with the wintrels; a desire that a few people expressed.

That's one possibility, and I wouldn't mind doing it, but obviously it'd take time, and I'd have to have to rethink how to handle things like how the progress nodes look. Maybe the first two easier songs would be necessarily on Casual, without their scores contributed, and it's only the final one that counts for the final score? But that might not be sufficiently rewarding.

If I didn't do that, I could expand Remedy's role, giving her extra content whenever you visit her each day, like with Hearth currently. She could give you 'singing lessons', a new song a day, which is always on Casual mode, and which teaches a particular technique such as playing long sequences at speed or switching between the modes mid-melody. This would flesh out Remedy, and it'd make all these practice sessions optional in the same way that Hearth's dialogue is.

I don't know if I will do either of those things, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts. If I went the Remedy route, it'd be easier to add in without disturbing the structure of the rest, but the practice songs might not be explicitly related to any of the wintrels' song content. If I went the 2-3 songs per wintrel route, it'd allow for build up with each character, more time with them, and a longer and hopefully less stressful game, but it'd be (maybe?) more challenging for me to implement. Either would take days, too, to compose all the music... though hopefully not many if they're shorter than and derived from the existing tracks in some sense. Plus I'd be using all the existing assets (character models, sounds, etc), so they'd be a lot quicker than when I first added any of the songs.

So I'm interested in your thoughts about that, but I'm also wary of feature creep, and how long testing has already taken. I've no idea how long testing should take really, but I'm also aware that while I as the developer can hold my focus on this one thing for months, even the most well-meaning testers will lose interest soon (if they haven't already!), so I'd like to finish adding things while feedback is still coming in.

I do feel though that it's important to address accessibility concerns even if it takes ages, rather than rushing the release and receiving a very unfavourable response.

While I personally find the gameplay fun, I've been wondering a lot whether it's fundamentally fun, and why or why not. I was talking with someone about this in the comments, and I wrote a reply where I put into words something that I understood about this game but hadn't managed to properly verbalise previously. So when I did, it felt like something clicked, and I wanted to share!

I've talked before about how I feel that this game addresses 'higher' or 'cognitive' brain functions in a way that sets it apart from ordinary rhythm games, and I do still think that's the case. As you may or may not be aware, memory isn't one singular mental process; it comes in different kinds. Most rhythm games use something called procedural memory (also called implicit memory, or less formally as 'muscle memory'), which is essentially mechanical skill learning. It's what's engaged when walking, talking, riding a bike, things like that. The learned skills typically take the form of "see stimulus X, react using action Y", and they become more fluent as they're practised more often. Sindrel Song, on the other hand, relies on declarative memory (explicit memory), which is the memory you're using when explaining what happened yesterday or who the king of Americaland is.

(Memody was born with procedural memory for life skills but not declarative memory of the world!)

Once you sufficiently hone a procedural skill, you can use it to overcome increasingly complex challenges relating to it in your first try, since you're always responding in the moment using this basic react-to-stimulus behaviour. With Sindrel Song, though, while there's definitely an element of procedural memory that will develop over the course of gameplay (binding notes to finger movements), each song is a new experience that must be learned in its own right. It's like how literacy allows you to read a book (procedural memory), but reading a page then answering questions about it will require declarative memory and won't be a direct result of your general reading skill level; every page will be different.

Declarative memory uses more recently-evolved cortical brain regions, and more conscious attention, whereas procedural memory makes use of more primal structures that we share with animals and which are much better at fluently responding to the world. So declarative memory is more taxing to utilise; it's why exam revision isn't exactly a walk in the park. Because of that, and because Sindrel Song relies on it, I'm wondering how much raw enjoyment the average person would get out of this experience.

I really don't know, and it does worry me because of how much I've poured into this. I've been trying to tell myself that it's extremely subjective, and that a lot of people would choose their time to do something that might not actually have this raw 'fun factor', but which they enjoy on a different level instead. Some people might get their fun from going out and playing sport, dancing at concerts, going on waterslides; visceral, physical rushes. They might scoff at the thought of studying or reading, whereas for others, their idea of a good time is a night in with a densely-plotted book that really engages their mind. They might prefer chess over football. Sindrel Song would be awful to the former group, but could be a welcome gem to the latter group. I'd hope. But then I also wonder how many people of all 'types' learn instruments or languages for 'fun' and stick with that despite challenges, and whether that same mentality would be applied to this?

I know I can't please everyone, as much as I'd like to! But what I'm scared of is releasing this widely and ending up with reviews that are either very mixed or overwhelmingly negative. I suppose I'm used to my work getting reviewed quite highly, 4+/5 stars, so getting like 2/5 stars out of something I've poured my heart into would be devastating. I don't doubt that it could find an audience, but will they be a tiny minority?

I know that the people who've been reading and commenting on this blog for a while have learned how much of a sensitive little sausage I am, how badly I react to criticism, and I wonder how much that's affected feedback that's been given. I'm worried that people here will be telling me "yes, it's great, I like it!", while actually thinking something else, then I'll release it and the negative responses will pour in from far less sympathetic strangers.

Hearing harsh comments will hurt me now, I won't pretend it won't. But it'd be better, I think, to feel that pain, recover from it, then do what I can - if there even is anything I can do - to address the concerns while I still have the chance to before release.

I'm wondering whether to go from beta testing to open access before proper release, so then people can buy and pay for it but there might be more of an expectation that things can change based on feedback, but I don't know how that all works.



Anyway, for those of you that have played the game, I'd like your honest opinion: Do you *enjoy* it? Has it been a good experience, or something you've had to force yourself to stick with? Would you recommend it? If no to any of those, what could I do to address your concerns, if anything?

If you showed it to other people, what did they think? What kinds of people were they? Gamers? What types of games did they play? (I can't imagine this'd appeal to the sort of person who focuses on things like shooters!)

When you played it would be important though; there's a lot I've changed over the past couple of weeks! So if you didn't have, say, Casual mode or the panic system when you tested it or showed it to others, that'd make a big difference, I'd think.

I really do want to make this game as good as it can be, and I enjoy it a lot so I hope others can too, though I can't help but wonder whether I'm asking what spices I can add to a plate of cockroaches to make it appetising...

I'll keep making updates and adding them to the latest feedback post; I'll probably add the one with Dolour's updated song either today or tomorrow.




A random, barely-related thought that just popped into my mind: Something that's been talked about in comments is how gameplay can feel insufficiently rewarding, and how penalising mistakes is far worse a feeling than rewarding successes. I've been wondering about what to do about that for a while, and I suppose it's been cooking unconsciously for a few days, to suddenly 'ding!' now that it's ready.

BUTTERFLIES. That's the thought that came up! What if, whenever you finished a section, a 'butterfly' - or something like that - appeared in the background? By the end, you'd have a whole swarm of them that'd accumulated; you'd feel like you were influencing the environment with every success. They could be glowy and everything. Just a wild, completely unrefined idea!

If you have other ideas for how to make the learning stages inherently rewarding, I'd love to hear them!