Post #2 – Using play testing feedback
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What? Apart from the aforementioned (in this post) online play testing that Group Siren is continuesly conducting all of the student groups taking Game Design 2 (5SD064) at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland attended a pre-alpha play testing workshop last monday (12/2-2018).
Said workshop left us with a mountain of feedback which had to be processed and interpreted in order for Group Siren to be able to make improvements based on said feedback, which I, to the best of my ability have done. Throughout the play testing workshop we had each tester fill out a Google Form after playing the game a number of times. 1. Not always being able to make out enemy projectiles from the background. 2. Not understanding when they were unable to shoot (when the canon was reloading) 3. Not understanding when they had a power-up activated Why? The MDA-framework tells us that the developers and players of a game view said game differently and that achieving balance in a game requires play testing and iterative refinement. (R. Hunicke, M. Leblanc, and R. Zubek. (2004) Mda: A formal approach to game design and game research. www.researchgate.net, 1:5, Jan). Balance in a game can mean different things depending on wether it is a multi-player game or a single-player game, our game being the later it is important to remember that “The game doesn’t ask the player to make critical decisions without adequate information” (Adams, E. (2014) Fundamentals of game design, volume third edition. New Riders Publishing) or risk the player feeling that the game was unfair. As the game Behemoth is a shoot ’em up and dying can happen rather fast, should the player fail to kill the enemies, the two most critical decisions the player is asked to make is a) choosing where and when to shoot and b) choosing where to place the shield at any given moment. Conclusion During the upcoming iteration of the development of Behemoth we need to find better visual representations for power-ups and re-loading the canon as well as changing the color or appearance of the enemy projectiles in order to prevent the players from experiencing the game as unfair.  |
