5th post – Playtesting
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During the production of our “Shoot em up” game, we have had couple of playtests. For the first test, we made a survey with 4 questions. We had received 22 responses. As for the second playtest, we just asked the players what they did not like about the game and how to improve it. The purpose of playtesting was to get feedback on the game and maybe some advices on how to fix some problems.
During the Alpha playtest, we basically knew the issues of our game, so the feedback we got was not much useful because everybody pointed to the same known problems. The main problem was the movement, which was not feeling as a boat. Some people said it felt like boat is going through the mud instead of water, others said it was more like a car. There were many different opinions and there was not one which would dominate. For some testers, it seemed that the movement was too slow and for others it felt too fast. So, the feedback was not that helpful. We knew that the boat movement had to be adjusted, but it was not an easy thing to do. We got the same complain during the Beta playtesting as well. However, after we added 8 direction movement, because of 45-degree perspective angle, and animation of the wave behind the boat, it felt much better. The other more common complain we got was that enemies were not much challenging and too easy. For the Alpha playtesting, it was hard to say about enemies, because we had hearts as placeholders and it was a bit confusing for some people. But we still received feedback that they were quite easy. As for the Beta testing, we had only one type of the enemy and again testers said that it was easy to fight them. As a solution for this, we added 2 more type of enemies and some of them had faster speed, which made them more challenging. We tried to balance the difficulty level and at the beginning of the game there are not that many enemies, but getting closer to the boss, more enemies appear. Also, when the boss activated and the player is running away, then the boss spawns more enemies and it makes the game more difficult. Now we feel quite satisfied with the difficulty of the enemies and the game. Finally, I could say that although not all of the feedback was useful, but we did get some good advices. Therefore, since the game is made for the public, I think it is very important to listen to what people want from the game and how to improve it. Even though some comments might be useless, but if we select the serious comments, then we get the good idea how to make things better. In my opinion, the feedback which we received helped us to decide where we needed to improve and how.  |
