5SD064-How has playtesting affected my development?
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This is the fifth blog I am writing for Game development course, the FINAL is coming in next week and that means we are soon going to end our first shoot’em up-game making. I wish the winter could also end soon, the spring seems never come, or does it even exist? There is nothing you can change about it, but there are still many things in life we can make change of it, like the games we are making. How can we change it to become a better game based on the playtestings? We had two playtestings before ALPHA and BETA, to me they were very valuable and interesting. Every team had their games on PC for the testers which are the people from other teams to test them out. Each tester should fill in with a survey sheet or give the feedback orally to the team that has made this game. Our team Flytrap has made the game Umibozu, which you play as a boat in foggy sea environment, and you have to complete the mission based on a Japanese myth Umibozu. In the first playtesting as well as for ALPHA, we only needed to have these features in game:
We got a lot good feedback regarding the movement, art and sound , and some critiques mostly about the floodlight that has the function to distinguish the enemy and power-up in foggy condition. The screen shot below is the survey answers from playtesting 1.
Besides the survey, we also received a lot useful feedback by orally. But to be honest, I feel like the feedback from playtesting 2 was more valuable than playtesting 1, as we had very limited game features in playtesting 1, it was far from a completed game. And we were still missing many important elements at that time before the ALPHA, so not only testers, but also the team members ourselves already knew what the problems were and how we should improve. However, the highlight in playtesting 1 was walking around and playing other team’s games. You could peep the teams who made games based on same concept with yours. We actually were very happy about it because no one else was having the same art style with us, as we assumed other group would just change the art style from the concept document so it would be smart to stick with the concept and follow the art style they already have there. And that was a guess, we have proved that in playtesting 1.
This is the feedback we got from playtesting 2, we received more critiques compared to the playtesting 1, which was a good thing as the critiques have pointed out the specific problems in game. So that we know how to polish the game for BETA with these specific feedbacks. It was also surprised to see how much improvement other teams have made since the last playtesting, it just motivated me to put more effort for my game, to be able to stand out from the others. Thanks for your reading, the construction of this blog might be little messy since it’s such a broad topic. Have a good day and I’m looking forward to seeing your comment!
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