Fire - and lots of it

This week, I wanted to look into how people are affected by threatening objects in the environment. I made a level set in a burning building, where player needs to navigate to the exit. Throughout, there are different sized fires that damage the player if they move into them, with larger fires dealing more DPS then smaller fires. There are some fires that are so small that they don’t deal any damage. At a couple of points, the player will need to move through fires in order to progress. If they are killed, they respawn at the start of the level.

I wanted to see how players reacted to the different sizes of fires; whether or not the amount of threat they feel increases with the size of the fire. I’m also interested in what they would do if they are confronted with two routes with different sized fires down them. What routes would they choose, or would they try to find a third option?

During testing, I saw that all of the players avoided the fires as much as possible, no matter what the size was. Even very small fires, the kind of which you could realistically stamp out, where seen as a threat. When confronted with the ‘2 routes with different fires’ scenario, most players took a third option and tried to go in-between the fires in one of the paths.

Something else that was interesting was how players interacted with the smallest, no damage dealt fires. Only a few players discovered that these particular fires were safe, but each of them believed that each example was an isolated incident, like it was a bug. When they went up to another fire of the same size, they still considered it a threat.

I also had half of the playtesters play the level in an 'over the shoulder' 3^rd person view (meaning they had one to one control over what they looked at). The default character in the UDK is a metal robot, and I wondered if players would notice this and start the level thinking that they wouldn't be hurt by fires. However, they didn’t. They played in the same way that the 1st person players did. This reinforces the notion made in the 'Material Semantics' test levels that players don’t seem to think about the properties of certain materials when playing, unless they are taught it.

Another observation is how the majority of players tackled the final section:

For this, the player needs to jump through the fires to get to the exit. There is an additional route that the player can take, but it leads to a dead end.

All of the players went to the dead end, which is to be expected. The majority of the players saw the two fires as an impassable barrier, and so back tracked to find a new solution. What was interesting was that after they came back to the exit, whether or not they had been killed by another fire and respawned, they went back to the dead end, even though they knew that there was nothing there to help them. They likely went there to find if there was anything that they had missed. One player however said, ‘I don’t know why I keep coming here’, which could indicate some sort habit or a subliminal, hard wired human behaviour involving retracing step. In the Vine level there were some players, after falling to their deaths, would retrace the same route that they took previously, even if it was a difficult one. This is something I'm going to read into more.