First Trial with Musician

Yesterday a couple of friends of mine came to my place to test T-Drum. This was the first formal player test. Many people had previously tested particular features or played for short periods, but this was the first time players were coming specifically to sit down and check all the game can do. Results were incredible. The first tester was an experienced, though, non professional musician, playing one of the new generative structure packs. He struggled a bit at first but within the first 15 minutes, with a few tips on how to coordinate sounds, managed to setup an interesting composition. His partner, a non-musician with a lot of gaming experience, which had heard the tips given to the first player and seen him in action, quickly picked it up after and was also able to produce pleasant melodic compositions right from the start. I couldn't be happier about the success both found in the musical aspect of the game, being able to quickly get adjusted to it and produce interesting musical results. It also highlighted the importance of knowing key coordination mechanics and extra info on how the audio system works, as the those tips had immediate impact on their performance. To that effect, those tips and extra info have been added to the rules section and additional posts will be made on Steam and Instagram showcasing these close to the game's release. Furthermore, we had a discussion on audio packs, how different audio packs worked better or worse. How some were more difficult and required a higher level of concentration/focus to produce good musical results as opposed to others which tend to work well independently of game state. There was also suggestions to create larger audio packs broken into sections so players can create compositions by stages, an example being percussion for the first board , then a bass board, then a piano board, so on and so forth. And the musician tester created a percursion based pack featuring natural sounds from wood and pelt instruments that I must say was easier to use than any of the packs I had created. In terms of point scoring I noticed the first augments took a long time to appear and when the user doesn't select point scoring augments for the first ones they become increasingly sparse. In a previous personal test I had noticed in late game with several point scoring augments added, new augments show up too regularly. The points needed for augments to appear will be adjusted, so they are easier to find early and harder to find later. Testers seemed engaged and having fun, wanted to keep on exploring and only left due to time constraints. This was an outstanding experience which filled me with joy. The findings, discussions and suggestions were highly informative and I believe will produce major upgrades for T-Drum.