Playtesting in our game

My own playtesting

First off, I wanna talk about the playtesting I do on my own while programming. Unity gives some good tools and functionality when testing, mainly the console(for debugging) and the ability to adjust variables while running the game in the inspector. This makes it way easier to balance certain features, and also just compare the game feel with different values for variables, like for movement.
This is somewhere I hope to improve though, to use the tools unity provides, and also write scripts to just make testing easier. It’s something I’ve started to appreciate a lot in the later parts of the project as I’ve started to use it a bit more.

In general I try to make as many variables public so that it’s easier for my teammates to adjust them and test, this is somewhere I think we as a team could improve. Test more with different values in between us and talk about what feels best. For my part, I wanna learn more about the inspector and how to customize it to make changing variables simpler/more intuitive for others.

Also, work on my variable naming, the bane of programmers.

Playtesting sessions

Other than the playtesting I’ve done on my won and with the team, we had organized playtesting sessions at the university. On these all the groups/teams set up a computer or two running their game, and we could go around and playtest others games. There were two of these, one for the alpha version, and one for the beta.
During both play-tests we had an online survey they had after playing, and did some notation of reactions, comments, etc. while they were playing. This gave us easily comparable data through the survey, and some very valuable data through notations.

Although a lot of the data we got was issues we were already aware of, getting fresh eyes on the game revealed a number of issues we weren’t aware of. A few examples are that our shield power-up looked like a mine, a players therefore initially avoided it, the shift key for boosting felt awkward for people not used to PC games (where Left-Shift is often used for sprint).

Another aspect of the playtesting was just being able o show of what you had to other people. Even though the game might in some cases be a broken mess, it’s nice to be able to see others reactions to the game, and for me at least gave a slight motivation boost.

Aight, that’s all for me, see ya next week.

About Wiktor Ravndal

2017 Programming

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