Blog 5: The importance of playtesting
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When playtesting it is important that you know what you want to test and how you want to test it. Doing a playtest with the wrong focus could lead to no useful feedback what-so-ever and make that test practically useless. If you want to test the games difficulty, make sure the enemies are the main focus of the game, or if you want to test the level design and how the player approaches the game make sure you watch and analyze how the player approachs and plays the level. When we did our playtests we tried to have the main focus on the difficulty of our game and so in our first playtest we tested to see if the game was to hard or easy, if it was to fast or too slow and so what we did was the had the level done with enemies rushing towards the player and we asked and watched how the players approached the game. During the first playtest we could see that players were having an extremely hard time playing the game, the game was way to fast in terms of player movement and enemies speed. After the playtesting session that lasted 4-5 hours we had our data and we got some pretty interesting results. People found that the game wasn’t really to hard, but the feeling the game gave them was bad. This means that the players had focused on the wrong thing but it still told us something about our game and what had to be changed.
For our game we had chosen the Umibozu concept where the play area is covered in mist and enemies or power ups come towards the player shrouded in fog which leads to a mystery aesthetic that the player can experience. One of the first problems we faced during the first playtest was how we didn’t have the fog implemented, so realising this we could see the playtest as irrelevant feedback since a core mechanic of the game was not present and we could not judge or decide changes for the game when something as important as the fog was not implemented. This led to our first playtest basically being a failure since we could not draw any important feedback from it. This is where I learnt that if you have a playtest scheduled, prioritize things that you then want to test.
For our next scheduled playtest we figured that we wanted to test if the game gave the player a good feeling, if there were any emotions present such as stress or the player being nervous. When the playtest started we noticed that the game was still pretty hard, but at that time it was not relevant but we could see that players were stressed and nervous since they had no idea what was behind the fog and some players really enjoyed the feeling the game gave them. But we noticed a problem with the playtest that was caused by one of our programmers, the player could not die. This led to a lot of player noticing and since they could not die they did not see the game as scary anymore since, you know, if the player can’t die they won’t feel any stress when playing. We did get some useful feedback from the playtest related to the fog where many thought that it was too bright. Another piece of the feedback was how the fog shapes, the enemies and certain objects the player could pick up, we easily distinguishable and often led to the player knowing almost within minutes what was behind each piece of fog.
During and after the second playtest there was a lot of feedback about the fog in our game where many thought it would have been better if it was darker, and there was a lot of people who had that specific feedback in mind so we knew for sure that maybe we should change it and make it darker since that obviously what people wanted to have when playing. When we brought this up people still did not want to have it darker and that was really confusing to me since we saw from the playtest that having the fog darker was such a common feedback so why shouldn’t we do it? This led to a long discussion and it we decided to make it at least a big darker to even our opinions out.
So in short you need to make sure that what you want to test is the main focus of the test, if you want to test the enemies make sure the player encounters a lot of enemies or if you want to test the level layout, pay attention to how they approach the game and take feedback from the way they play the game. Lastly remember that not always the tester is right, it’s only their opinion and you have to analyze it before deciding on the changes.  |
