Blog post 5: Playtesting
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Hello there. This week I am going to talk about how playtesting has affected the development of the game “Depth”. During this course we had two different sessions of planned playtesting, where everyone in the course and teachers, tests all of the games in development. The first session was right before the alpha presentation and the second session was right before the beta presentation. To do this, we used two computers with the then latest version of the game. When people came to try it, we always had two members watching them play, to take notes on what was working well and what was not working well. During the first session, that was right before the alpha, we quickly noticed that people had a hard time distinguishing between the enemies and the power up. Because we did not have anything to show what was an enemy and/or friendly item, the playtesters spent a while shooting at everything, no matter what it was they saw. To counteract this problem, we put in voice acting in to our game, that explains everything in a tutorial level. Though, this was not implemented until after the second playtesting session. During the second playtesting, we still saw the same problem with people shooting everything, atleast from the people that did not try the game during the first playtesting. Though this has been solved with the voice acting that is now implemented. Another problem that we noticed was that the playtesters did not see the boss that is chasing them, since there is very limited light. We did have a light from the eye of the boss, but it was not enough. There were playtesters that died several times without noticing. When asked if we reused the same level in a loop, it was obvious that it was a problem. Therefore, we decided that there had to be a glowing outline on the boss, for extra visibility. The playtesting that we had by sending our game to friends, that are not in the same education, gave the same negative results. Though, the positives from the playtesting is that we got the aesthetics that we are looking for right. The “last leg” theme, as well as the stress and horror feeling of the game are all met, according to the testers.  |