I’m currently still going through user testing but it’s been really interesting so far. Designing puzzles is tricky and requires a lot of input from people who have never interacted with them.
As somebody who’s designing the concepts and flow myself, of course the puzzles are very easy for me and it’s very difficult to imagine how they’ll be performed by other people, what they’ll get stuck on, the different approaches they’ll use and, importantly, whether they’re actually fun or not.
So I asked some friends to play through it and collected some feedback. Here’s a few basic bulletpoints on interesting observations and my solutions for them.
I still haven’t tested with many people at the time of writing but really looking forward to getting more people trying this thing out…
Problems With Different Environments
Typically, I worked on this project on the weekends, during the daytime at a desk. I always thought the cube lights looked very cool but when I tested the puzzle with some friends, two things I noticed…
One player tested it in the evening and found the flashing lights way too bright… she had to cover her eyes a few times, especially during the AUX formula section; the cubes were just too dazzling and the flashing made her uncomfortable. The fix? Just turning down the brightness of course but still, if somebody’s playing in a brighter environment, I want to crank the brightness up for maximum effect. So the puzzle actually has an accompanying iPhone app that allows the control of the LED behaviours and testing of the servos.
Another player tested it in a bar and, I think perhaps because of the softer lighting, he found it hard to differentiate yellow and green flashes when entering the colour patterns into the website. This was really interesting to discover… I didn’t want to just remove one of the colours so instead, I addressed it at a code level. My solution was to just treat yellow and green as the same input when detecting correct inputs from the user. So yellow, green, red, blue is a valid input if the cubes are actually flashing green, yellow, red, blue.
The “Shell Game” Puzzle
So far, nobody has really grasped the “follow the green then remove the cube” shell game like puzzle.
Interestingly, one person thought they had to “catch” the green whilst the green cube was moving around. Actually, I think that’s perhaps a more fun puzzle than I actually created but that’s a bit too much of a rework right now. Instead, my attempted solution here was to just leverage the OLED display and show “FOLLOW GREEN” whilst the green cube moved around and then “REMOVE GREEN” when the user is supposed to remove the appropriate cube.
Text Treatments
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latency with setting colours
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different ways of solving maths puzzle (kazuyo)
- shakthi breaking it
- green/yellow issue
- tried to catch green