Playtesting

During project that we’re in, we’ve had two playtesting sessions where all the teams get together and try each other’s games. We had a survey that the participants were encouraged to fill out after they tested our game. We used the same question for both occasions in hope to see what the difference would be. On top of the survey we documented reactions and in game behaviour while they were playing.

The first session was unfortunately affected by an error that we hadn’t encountered prior to that. I have been constantly trying out every feature in the game, trying to find flaws or ways to improve it. The issue was that we didn’t built the game while testing, rather only doing it in the engine. Therefor when we did for the first playtesting there was a major problem when the player moved the mouse pointer too close to the edges of the screen. It caused some major disturbance in the movement and ruined the experience for many of the testers.
We did manage to get some useful feedback, but the issue stole a lot of focus from the actual gameplay.

The one thing that’ve been altered the most due to the playtesting results is the swarm ability. I have mentioned the ability in earlier posts, but it might be worth describing once more. The player controls a bee which is accompanied by several more bees on the left of the screen, acting as the players lives. The ability (that’s used by holding down RMB) allows the player to gather all the bees in a circle around the player. The main purpose of this was to provide mobility.
Initially, you could fire projectiles while using the ability but with greatly increased movement speed as a setback. Many playtesters used it way more than was intended. Several the participants died from too much collisions because of the ability’s speed up but still considered it to be a dominant strategy. So, the situation we had was people dying early, some successfully overusing the ability and some who played the game the way it was intended.
As a result of this we added obstacles to the game, which gave the ability a clearer purpose and removed shooting while using it. The new design is truer to the original purpose and is still useful when encountering enemies.

Overall the feedback we received was very positive, but we also got some very useful guidance for improvements. The response we got has really shaped our game for the better. The sessions were extremely helpful as we got so many to try out the game at the same time which would have been way more difficult to arrange on our own. On top of that, it was interesting to get a fresh perspective from the outside, that haven’t been involved in the development and already knew the intent of all the features.

About Maximilian Kassander

2017 Game Design

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