The Importance of Playtesting
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Hello once again! Fredrik here and today I will talk about the importance of good playtesting. It’s something that has been said again and again but the real significance isn’t really felt until it’s tried. It’s just one of those things that you have to experience for yourself. As for our game, we have gotten a lot of very good feedback from both of the playtests that we held, some of those things that related a lot to my work were as I mentioned in a previous blog post the movement of the player, way back in the alpha the movement of the player was very static and did not feel at all like a bee flying, this was very great feedback because I think we kind of forgot that we hadn’t moved away from that placeholder movement since the start of the graybox testing. Another great idea that we got from the playtesters was the fact that you could hold down the shoot button without any repercussions and that in that case, you might as well not have a firing button at all, something that we had not thought about at all. We ended up deciding that we wanted a slowdown while firing so you would be penalized for holding it down all the time. A third example is the fact that you could quickly press the formation button and then immediately fire and still be able to fire with all of the bees at once without draining that much honey, even if this was not said by the testers it was one of the most dominant strategies that they used. This was reduced in effectiveness by adding a flat cost to activating the formation at the start so that if you repeatedly click the formation key you will rapidly run out of honey.  In conclusion, playtesting is always necessary but it has to be done with the right mindset- You have to do it with an open mind to the ideas of the testers, but still keep in mind that they are not always correct. It is a difficult balance that has to be struck but the results are much more noteworthy that way, it is really the only way of getting something valid out of it.
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