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Hello Everyone!
Playtesting our game is very important, said the teachers to us very early in this program and I thought to myself ”Why? cant you just test the game yourself to see the flaws in it”.
I couldnt been more wrong.. We learned especially in this course how important it really is. Playtesting really helped us develop a better game.
We started by playing it ourselves, to see what we thought were good thing about it, what needed a bit tweeking and what we already knew was bad. And from our notes of the game we came up with a few questions we would ask the testers to see if the thought like we did, or if we needed to change something.
We asked them questions like:
”How did the the movement feel?”
”Did you like the the fire rate?”
”Was the power-up useful?”
”Did you use the floodlight in a meaningful way?”
We knew we had a few things already we had to change, but seeing someone who havent tried our game before interact with it really opened our eyes and see what our game really was. We didnt just summarize the answer we got from our questions form, but also watch them play our game, what things the instantly understood, and what things the struggled to see.
With all this in became clear to us that we had to change a lot in our game to make it clearer for the player to understand what to do.
For example, in our test we had the same shadow sprite for both our enemies and our power-up, so the tester mostly just shoot all the shadows without realizing we also had a power-up. Most tester were clueless that we had implemented one. And they never used the floodlight to see the difference between power-ups and enemies because it was to slow and uncontrollable. When we tried this, we knew the power-ups and could see the difference in the movement of the shadow sprite, but as a new player it was impossible.
So after the playtesting we sat down in our group and discussed everything we learned from the test, which was quite a lot, to see how we can change a few things to make the game clearer. It also helped to play others game to see how theyve tackled problems.
After testing our game, I did realize how important it is to have someone else test, we learned things we never even thought about!
About Simon Ågren
2017 Game Design
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