How has playtesting affected/improved our game?
What have we iterated using playtesting?
We used our first playtesting to inform us of things that we might not have thought of, rather than things that we already knew did not work or needed more development.One of the questions that we had asked the playtesters was:
What was your least favourite moment or interaction?
And these were some of the answers:
- Sometimes the controls felt a bit unresponsive
- No indication of being hit, too easy to beat
- Being overwhelmed by enemies that you can't really dodge
And we dealt with these problems as soon as we could to prevent any future problems where we would get similar responses to this question.
What steps did we take to adress these answers?
The ship controls felt unresponsive to some and what we needed to do was change this quickly.
What I had done was to write a User-Story to adress that, and provided it to our programmer so that we could have a discussion about the boat movement.
This is the user story:
As the ship
I will move slowly and floaty
Because i want to emulate the feeling of a flying ship in the air
As the ship
I will move slowly and floaty
Because i want to emulate the feeling of a flying ship in the air
This helped the programmer to test different ways of programming the controls, and eventually make the ship feel much better in the game.
What we also needed to fix was some kind of indication of being hit, and what we did was to implement a Health-Bar
And this fixed the issue with no indication of damage for the players, which was a huge problem at that stage.
And the problem about being overwhelmed by enemies was fixed rather easily by me making a level design for the game, and this is how I did it.
I created an easy sheet to be able to understand how the enemies would spawn within the levels. and it went as follows:
Level 1
- 1 G
- 3 G
- 2 G + 1 P
- 2 P + 3 P
- End of level screen - You pass the portal and proceed to the next level.
G = Glaucus, P = Pufferfish, R = Ray, T= Tangler. (These are the enemies within the game)
And this is how we were able to not have any overwhelming amount of enemies. since previously the enemies spawned forever without any end, which made the game unnecessarily difficult.
And this is how playtesting affected our game for the better.
Hi Axel!
ReplyDeleteFirst thing I must comment: As a student with the same minor as you (design) I am so happy to see that you are using user stories in this active, productive way! I honestly haven’t seen too much of that during this course, but I myself have found user stories to be a powerful tool for communicating design to the team. Thank you!
Now to the subject of this blog post – playtesting. In your blog post, you describe both why and how you planned for your first playtest session in a clear way. Your question to the playtesters about their least favourite moment or interaction seems to have given you valuable feedback. I can see that you had the value for the player in focus when you analysed the results and it is nice to see the feedback you received leading to such specific improvements to your game.
One thing you leave out that makes me curious, and that is the second playtesting. At that time in the process, I guess you had more things to test and perhaps completely different things to learn from the playtesters - I would have loved to hear about it!
Overall – god job!
/Anna Malkan Nelson, Kraken