Playtesting and development changes
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The playtest went fairly well for our group. Despite of that, in the first 40 minutes of the playtest our game broke, and our programmer was sick- but was made functioning again by or game designer, this meant that we lost some playtest time and did not get as many results as we could have. We did get a lot of useful information from them though, that changed a lot of aspects in the game. For example, a lot of people playing where unsure of whether the cormorant (bird) power up was an ally or an enemy, an many of them tried to shoot, it and thought it was a bug that you couldn’t kill it. We are still going to stick with the design for the power up, because redoing it would take too much time. But we did choose to have introduction pop-up for both the cormorant power-up and the oil pick-up in order to make the player understand that these are helpful.
The introduction pop-ups:
Something else, graphics-wise, we choose to change because of the playtest was the size of the objects in the game. The pick-ups where so small it was hard to see which pick-up it was, and the enemies were so small that the players had a too much hard time aiming and hitting them – and needed to be scaled up.
It was also showed that the games control tutorial needed a lot of fixing, many didn’t understand that the light mechanic could and needed to be toggled on and of in order to save oil and see enemies and objects.
The fog, which is integral to the game was also clearly in need of being changed – As it was during the playtesting, many thought the fog was cloud, and some become nauseous from its movement and the way it looked. The fog also did not hide the silhouettes but on the objects in the game, that was coloured dark, something that rendered most of the mechanics in our game unnecessary, because the player could see where everything was at all time, and took away the aesthetic goal of “mystery” we had. – we understood it needed to be coloured white and lighter in order to blend in better with the fog.
The GUI also had to be remade, a lot of people thought the heath bar was too long.
Picture showing the fog, tutorial, enemy size – could sadly not get a picture of how the silhouettes looked:
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