Playtesting
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Having our game played by other students has been a great opportunity for us to receive a lot of constructive feedback, which was taken into consideration and later analyzed in order to make the right adjustments to the game mechanics in accordance with the advice we received following the playtesting session. Being one of the developers of a video game means that you often get the opportunity to playtest it in the hopes of finding bugs or other strange behaviors that need some twitches to improve the game. It is essential that you get a good sense of how playing the game feels so that you can make changes along the way accordingly. However, being constantly in touch with the game you are creating and playtesting it every day means that you also get really used to some of the bad mechanics, like movement or shooting for example. It is not until your game gets played by other people outside the development circle, that you realize some things are slightly off. For example, it did not occur to us to give playtesters a tutorial regarding the control scheme as we were already quite used to it and did not feel the need for that. Some played through the whole level without even being aware of specific features. We just relied on the fact that the control layout was intuitive for someone who has played shoot em up games in the past, and we assumed that everyone had the same naturality when it comes to figuring out how to control a video game. However, this is not always the case. Considering the feedback we got from the players, we made sure to include instructions to guide and to provide the players with enough knowledge for them to be able to take on the challenge. So to answer this week’s topic request, playtesting is the only way for us to discover what is not working properly in the game and what needs to be done to correct the issue. It has proven useful for tweaking certain values such as: fire rate, damage, enemy spawning, movement and so on. What needs to be remembered from now on is that we also need to let other people have a go at it, otherwise we will trap ourselves in a bubble thinking that the game is perfect just the way it was developed, and we will not be able to improve the final product. See you next week!  |