MSc Dissertation - Game And Survey

[senor-cojones]

Hey guys,

You may remember I posted here before asking for help on an initial survey for my dissertation (http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=194392), well now I'm nearing the finish of the practical element of my project and I'm looking for help again if possible.

So far I've been working on a 3D Game environment with custom gameplay and HUD elements (basically making a simple full game) and it's nearing completion as can be seen in my video;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-kAP0MT2FU

In order to complete the making of the game I need to test it upon volunteers, who would need to download my game and then fill out a short survey for my dissertation, and that would be an amazingly great help to me.


My game is available here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/20422466/DE-WoodsG/DE-WoodsG.rar

My survey is available here: http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=IHEKKN_a3fad9f8



The game is about 182mb in size and the survey has about 30 questions, but most are multiple choice so it should only take about 5-10mins to complete in total. If you could download my game, fill in the survey and pass around to anyone at all that would be such a great help to me (especially looking for novice game players).

The game runs mostly at a solid 60fps on my PC which is Win7 64bit, Q6600 stock and ATI HD5700, so my pc isn't great and it runs fine, and it also runs ok enough for me to record it, so hopefully it runs fine for everyone else, but if not just PM me and I'll sort something out.

If you do have any trouble running it then please try closing any unused apps like firefox/chrome/etc and also run at a lower resolution (in the settings menu try 800x600 or 640x480) and this should help in giving more frames per second.

Last thing... all art, features, concepts etc are mine except for the following;
Trendy Entertainment- for use of the horde code/enemy models/AI.
Michael Allar- for use of the Forecourse UI.
Epic Games- for use of the character/weapon models and making a great engine.

Regarding the results of the previous survey- I'm holding on to them for the moment as I'm going to use the results of this batch of testing to compare against the previous survey and I'll post results later (without names/emails/etc!)

So yeah that's it for now. If you could play my game and fill in my survey I would be eternally grateful.

Thanks guys
Aaron

 

[Sjosz]

If I have time after work I'll consider doing this thing.
Does this require a version of UDK or another UE version next to the download?

 

[toniglandyl]

can't test it before a couple of days, but good luck anyways ! :up:

 

[senor-cojones]

@Sjosz- If you download the rar it has the installer file inside for the game, just run that and it'll let you play the game- no other files needed as far as I am aware. If you do get the time then I'd really appreciate your feedback to my survey as it's really going to help towards my dissertation

@toniglandyl- If you find the time to test it whenever you're free then I would be grateful to use your survey answers towards my dissertation results

Cheers to everyone that's done my survey so far

 

[senor-cojones]

Thought I'd post some more on the feedback I've had on this- a user said "game ran at 60fps with cpu at 60% usage and the GPU at 50% usage at the highest res. QX9650 & GTX 570 that is with everything open including PS, 3DS max and UDK editor." so that's pretty promising to me and I think I can be safe in the knowledge that it'll run mostly ok on most computers as long as the right resolution is set.

Also if anyone is experiencing a D3DCOMPILER_.dll error when installing or going to run the game then that means the DirectX needs to be updated for some reason. The solution is to download and install the latest update which is located here; http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3

Thanks for the feedback so far guys and please keep it coming! I'd really like to get a lot of replies to have as big a set a of results that I possibly can.

Cheers!

 

[Sjosz]

Played the thing, and filled out the survey. Have listed that I find it a bit unsatisfactory that the answers to the questions in the survey may be perceived as harsh without letting me elaborate on why I answered the questions in that way. Have provided my contact information for if you want to want my reasoning on things.

 

[senor-cojones]

@Sjosz- no worries, I regard you as one of the most skilled and interesting designers out there and as a professional you would come in from a different perspective to modders/fans/general public which is what I'm after so no worries about the comments, I need them if I'm going to improve and also get varied answers

Regarding the questionnaire a few of the questions are from a set of questions that aim to identify if you enjoyed the game, if you think games are fun, if you're addicted, etc and are more just general questions that I can use to compare to my original study. The rest try to focus on what I'm actually investigating which is called "An investigation into the impact of subjective time progression within computer games". So the main aims of it are a) collecting results that I can use to prove/disprove the use of subjective time and b) to improve the level as an artist (when I go back to it at the end of the survey).

A few things regarding the project itself... I've managed to port the DunDef stuff over to Sept 2010 UDK and get that all up and running, considering I'm not a coder in the slightest. This is also the first time I've touched a lot of things- I've never really considered efficiency on this sort of scale before, never touched Kismet (except for a small matinee door) and never considered level design, I've always been either an artist or a technical guy. I've also managed to set up all of the technical aspects relating to time as that's what I'm actually investigating.

The gameplay/etc aren't the main concerns with this as I'm using it as a testbed to investigate time effects, the version that you've played is one of 3 currently being tested and one of 12 overall, but I realise as a small level/game it has obvious flaws right now.

Thanks for your feedback, I may be contacting you soon asking how you feel I could improve the art direction/level design in time for my final hand in if that's ok and you have time (I know there's a lot of things that could be tweaked ).

Cheers Sjosz and cheers to anyone else that has filled in my survey so far

 

[senor-cojones]

Thanks very much for all the replies to my survey so far guys

I'm trying to analyse all results as scientifically as possible, and I'm noticing some interesting trends across the board- so far there is a very strong correlation of 0.95 (1 is the maximum/perfect) in agreement for losing track of time whilst playing games, so that's great as that's really the basics of what I'm researching for.

In order to have a high accuracy and confidence in my results I'd still very much like more people to take part in this, every little really does help!

Thanks so far, hopefully soon I'll be posting up actual results and comparisons (minus any names/private data as that is purely between you, myself and my supervisor/examiner).