Axis

Hey, I play tested your game. I played through both levels, and the Art showcase. All in all, I played for about 15 minutes. It took about 2-3 mins each to complete each actual level, and then in the Art Showcase I revealed the floor (Im assuming there is no “completing” this level). If you have any questions let me know, though I suspect you wont have too many given its generally quite short. 

Playtest Feedback - Axis

Store page

• Its really not clear what youre showing in the capsule image, not is the title of the game really clear at all.

UI

• The Equip text appears noticeably blurry. Improving the text rendering would help with overall UI readability and polish.

Controls

• Mouse sensitivity feels inconsistent between axes. Horizontal movement feels too slow, while vertical movement feels way way too fast, although the vertical movement may simply feel exaggerated in comparison to the sluggish horizontal sensitivity, so I do say that slightly tentatively.
• I'd suggest balancing the X/Y sensitivity and ideally providing a mouse sensitivity option as I would have immediately changed those.

Presentation

• The executable is currently named MY PROJECT, which gives an impression, but as mentioned above, obviously I know this would change.
• VSync appears to be disabled, resulting in noticeable screen tearing which was pretty distracting. I'd suggest enabling it by default or providing a VSync option in the graphics settings even at this stage.
• Visually, the environments are not particularly interested to look at (at this stage) but I don’t think that’s the point of this demo. I would be keen to see what visual style you settle on.

Movement

• The transition between normal traversal and walking on walls is handled quite well. It isn't completely seamless, but the change in player orientation feels surprisingly smooth and the mechanic itself has been implemented nicely. I could be wrong, but it feels like you purposely slow the players movement during transitions. If you do, it does help with the orientation change. I would be curious to know if you plan to add a vignette option to narrow the FOV for those that get more easily distorted.
• The fact that you transition onto walls via the curved ramps is very quickly obvious, and the fact that you fall back to reality when you jump off is also very much immediately obvious so I think those are well implemented.

Path Reveal

• I'm currently unsure about the purpose of the path reveal mechanic. From what I played, it wasn't required or particularly useful for any of the puzzles, so I wasn't sure how it was intended to fit into the core gameplay loop. The mechanic itself appeared to be implemented neatly, but given there was no real purpose to it in any of the levels, its kind of hard to give you any more feedback beyond that. Given the fact you have two levels, and a showcase level, its weird that the path reveal didn’t have a purpose in this demo.

 

Misc

• The traversal suit is hidden in a corner right at the start of the Explore level. I’m not sure of the reasoning behind that given its equipped in Disorientation. Is there a plan to have sections without the suit? Equipping it almost felt unnecessary, or of why its placed in a corner as opposed to in the players natural path.

Overall

The wall-walking and path-reveal systems both appear technically well implemented, particularly the transition into different traversal orientations. I would be interested to see how those mechanics are incorporated into the actual puzzle design and core gameplay loop. The levels were very short, so they weren’t challenging, but if you introduced a few additional mechanics, like buttons, pressure pads etc, you could definitely have a pretty cool puzzle game here (if that’s what youre going for). 

If you built on this, I could definitely see it turning into something quite fun.