Question 2: Are you making Umibōzu?
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I had a hard time with it in many ways. A lot of it I felt was not very useful. Largely because I was already aware of many of the criticisms to be had. The timing of the shield; the lack of variation in the enemies and their functions; poor communication with player, especially with feedback; the companion characters in the game not having enough utility, differentiation, or personality for the player to care thus rendering them as a burden. Many of these were already brought up at the alpha playtest. Many of these problems should have been changed before this playtest, so we could get more feedback on what we do not know what we should change. We would not or could not do certain things due to time and ability too, of course, particularly with the companion characters. It gives me anxiety to think how I can’t tell the respondents on the Google Form “I know, and I would fix it if I could.” And many of those things I probably could, if I took the initiative. I really should learn more about the physical and technical aspects of making a game. I had started to try to do that over a year ago. I barely started at all. Then again before the start of school. Didn’t make it much farther. Hopefully, this will finally be the push to get me act. I tried to maintain a policy of “good enough” for the game, which allowed me to sit back more. But this wasn’t always the case, and I would be very particular about where I was dissatisfied with the game. My behaviors have been inconsistent and I haven’t been proactive enough. The playtesting really made me look inward at this. I blamed myself for how unsatisfied I am with the game. I did the least physical work on it, and being both the Scrum Master and Product Owner’s duties has of course worked out poorly. At the same time I have a hard time blaming myself for things, so I externalize it at other faults which negatively affected the project.  It would help to focus more on the positives. People mostly had nice things to say about our game. A few gave good feedback in getting the player character and companion characters mixed up. The stupid controls I had chosen (M or right arrow to shoot, N or left arrow as a secondary action, because I thought it would be good hand placement. There’s more to say about that regarding the mouse, but I won’t go into that) definitely needed to be changed. I thought I had cut down the time required to fill out our survey with a reduction in the number of questions, but because they were all short answer, people still took a while thinking of what to write. Answers weren’t more than a sentence, generally. Many were just one word, which is still useful. It’s less disheartening to see just “good” multiple times along with the critiques, and it’s easier to see the proportions of what people thought. It may have been a better idea to do a required multiple choice question with an optional short answer for each, but I’m still learning. As a result of the playtesting, we have made communication more of a focus. This was an area we were going to add to anyway, though. I would include changing the controls as part of this. Another thing was to prioritize secondary, non-gameplay aspects to attempt to make the player care about the companion characters. We had found quite soon before the playtesting that we would have to cut other functions for these characters anyway. We found that putting dialogue into the game was actually not that hard, so we are now adding some in. Otherwise, we are on the same path as before. Am I the same though?  |
So, the playtesting. It sure did happen.