Robot Rock

Feedback from Robot Rock to Traffic Sim:

Strengths:

Overall, after installation, jumping into the game was fairly simple. The menus were well designed (particularly the menu that is accessible from in the levels) and it was easy to get into the first level. Inside the level, the controls were fairly intuitive, and there was little trouble in figuring out how to place traffic lights and configure their settings, and then remove them later (although setting multiple lights up to behave as we wanted proved to be quite complex). The game was also appeared bug free in terms of crashes, and transitions between adding, configuring, and removing stop lights were very smooth and predictable. Other things we liked were the bug reporting form, which made it very clear exactly how you wanted others to submit bugs by providing a number of useful fields to fill out. The website was very clean and clutter free, and information about the project was readily accessible. The design documentation also seemed very straight forward, and provided that the code adheres to the specifications dictated in the class diagram, it seems like jumping into the project and working on the code would be very feasible.

Improvements:

The user documentation could be improved a bit, it might be nice to see some screenshots with labels and captions as opposed to large chunks of text (which feel like they could be a bit more concise and less wordy). It also mentions features like stop signs that aren't currently in the game, which was a bit confusing. As for gameplay, the general opinion was that not enough feedback was provided for level progress, the purpose was a little confusing at first, and setting up effective traffic lights was quite a task. Setting up 4 individual lights and getting their timing correct, so no adjacent lights would be green at the same time was rather complex, it may be more useful to have options to set up all the lights or stop signs for an intersection at the same time. We also thought that a yellow state for traffic lights might be useful and realistic, because sometimes cars would crash when a light turned green and another car was in the intersection. A full in game tutorial would be really useful to present the purpose and mechanics of the game. Level feedback seemed a bit minimal, and it was often unclear when the level was beaten, or under what conditions the level would fail, etc. Another feature that was desired was to have the capability to skip the setup period before the level if the user is ready (might be even better to just not have a timer for this, and just have a ready button). There was also a lot of excess output in the console, presumably this was all debug info and was of no significance to the user, but it would be nice not to be distracted by this. On the developer side of things, checking out the source was identical to the user download, so no problems there. It didn't appear to be specifically documented anywhere how exactly a build was supposed to be done, but python setup.py sdist did create a tarball, it would just be nice to see this documented (or more prominently if we missed it). Lastly, we would comment that a substantial percentage of the population has red-green colorblindness and it should be possible for this demographic to understand interface cues without this color differentiation.

Reported Bugs: 11-16 on Existing Bugs List