Exercise 1.1 : Become a Playtester
Me and my friend had recently played Forsaken, a game on Roblox by Souldrivenlove. In the game, you're either a survivor or a killer. When I first played as a survivor, the first thing I noticed was the objectives on the right hard corner of the screen. It directed me to complete generators, which I hadn't known what a generator was until watching another survivor use one. Unlike other asymmetrical survivors vs killer/s games, where there would a pop up that would only show for a couple of seconds to hit a skillcheck, there would be a large puzzle for me to do. You had to solve several connect the dot puzzles in order to complete it. Since the puzzle took up almost the entire screen as well as my own focus, I found myself at times getting hit unnecessarily by a killer as I was too focused on doing the puzzles and not looking around.
The maps also did not feature things such as pallets like other games in the same genre, meaning that in chases, the survivor must use their abilities and movement to evade the killer. Different survivors had certain abilities, some were passive and some I would have to activate by pressing a button. It was important for me to read up on what each thing did in the lobby beforehand, but I would only after a couple games do that.
Usually, I would run around to find machines and if I ever got chased, I would head towards a group of people to use them to either distract the killer or use them as a shield. Some survivors could heal or even stun the killers, but since I had only just started playing, I could only either turn invisible or become invincible for a couple of seconds.
My friend, who was more seasoned than me at the game, was more aware of certain spots that they'd like to distract the killer at, as the way to win a match was to get the countdown timer to 0 before the whole lobby died. When the killer was relatively new, he'd escape easily or even distract the killer for the entire game, but more experienced ones managed to better him.
I usually died, since I didn't know I had to conserve stamina to esacpe chases, nor did I know the techniques used to evade the killer even on low stamina. The controls were relatively easy to get ahold of, and you could change keybinds in the menu if you wanted to play differently. However, I discovered it was way more difficult to play on mobile than it was on console or desktop, as the controls took up more of your screen. I also figured that, the game should at least have a tutorial to help direct the player with finding certain features, as I had to figure things out on my own like the afk feature, the menu and even where the abilities were for the killers and survivors. My friend, who was more experienced than me, said he figured the game out eaisly, which might just be reflective of the genre as a whole.