Playtesting
|
The two playtesting sessions seem to have been scheduled to help encourage testing in less familiar environments to get an outside perspective on the game we’re creating. As well as this, giving other people access to your game will help detect bugs or design issues that you haven’t thought about yourself. Other people play your game differently and so you can see what happens when it is played “incorrectly” so to speak. The issue we found with the Beta playtest was that we needed time to work on the game at the time we had it, and so we couldn’t take full advantage of the playtest. Granted this was also a result of the issue we had with absence as mentioned in the Beta presentation. As a result of this, we didn’t get much useful information out of the Beta playtest which really was too bad as with a little more time to develop it would’ve really helped I’m sure.
The Alpha playtest however was very useful to us as it brought to light several issues that helped make the design of the game more appealing. As such the playtesting changed our development by highlighting for example the fact that we decided to go for full on level design rather than a challenge based procedural generation. For me as a project manager it has also helped to get a clear view of where development is going. The plan we made ahead of time had to be changed to accommodate for the constantly changing design of the game. These changes where a result of the playtesting and opinions from other players. For the programmers I know for sure it highlighted some issues we hadn’t thought of. The pause menu still allowed for the player to fire and use the flashlight. As such the player could fire in a circle around them indefinitely and when they unpaused the game, there would be a ring of projectiles flying from the ship in all directions. This insanely liberal fire rate caused issues with other features. For example it made our powerup and flashlight useless. This was something we had to try and fix in a few different ways. We therefore added a cooldown timer to the fire rate and a limit to the amount of ammunition the player had. As well as this we made the first powerup, the flare, an activation powerup so the player had a choice when to activate it. Without the playtest we might not have noticed these things and so we would’ve continued playing the game “like it was supposed to be played” and so created a flawed game. As mentioned, it did not only help us improve the game, but taught us important points in development. Testing outside of the development team is highly important.  |