The best guidance: Play Testing
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During the process of the project, we held two official playing testing session for each team’s game. One before the Alpha presentation, the other before Beta. I have to admit, we acquired lots of valuable feedback and settled decisions we may take plenty of time to decide. The thing that been contributed most is the balancing of the game. As the team members, we were all way too familiar with the features of the game. We know very timing of using weapons and how to use them properly and every attacking pattern of each enemy. After we tested it lots of times, the definition of difficult to us is completely different from other testers. In the Alpha, most of the players don’t even survive until the half of the game, especially the point which second enemy appeared and we renamed it to “Beginner killer” after Alpha.
For the solution of the balancing issue, we provided three different difficulties. Because we found that we couldn’t make a version that suitable for each level of players. Eventually, it would be either too hard to people who doesn’t play shooting game a lot or too easy to those hard core players. In addition, we added a tutorial level to teach players how to use every behaviors of the ship. It’s also friendly thing to players don’t really like to read a bunch of instruction. Therefore, the feedback of the Beta was mostly positive. We had 32 testers, 30 of them think the difficulty is moderate, because they were able to choose a suitable difficulty for themselves. And 31 testers like the tutorial level and feel it useful, the only player said “don’t know” because he skipped it.
We also received other feedback regarding the music and the art style. We talk about them at the meeting after Beta play testing and revised them later accordingly. As you can see, the benefits of testing your game is all-rounded. It’ll show most the problems you have right now and things may missed from your game. It was a pity we held the Beta play testing too early, and didn’t give me the time to implement the boss. Anyway, it taught the whole group a lot and told me to use it in the future game developing process.  |
