Blog post 5 – Playtesting

 
During this course we have had two playtesting workshops were other teams could test each other’s games and give feedback on them. And in our group Archon we have been working on showing our game Aetherial for the playtesting. The playtesting was arranged a few days before the Alfa presentation and the same for the Beata presentation.
The playtesting purpose were to let the groups see each other’s games and to get valuable information on how to improve your game. It […]

Playtesting Umibōzu

Hello, I am Hampus Bergström, the game designer for the team Wendigo that works on the game Umibōzu. During our course “Game Design 2: game Development” and therefore during development of this game, we have had the chance to playtest our game with all other first year student in the game education. Having such a large number of testers to test our game has helped us a lot to see what to change in or game and more importantly, what […]

5th post – Playtesting

During the production of our “Shoot em up” game, we have had couple of playtests. For the first test, we made a survey with 4 questions. We had received 22 responses. As for the second playtest, we just asked the players what they did not like about the game and how to improve it. The purpose of playtesting was to get feedback on the game and maybe some advices on how to fix some problems.

During the Alpha playtest, we basically […]

Playtesting

This weeks post is going to be focused on the playtesting sessions that we have gone through and the information that we received regarding our game. Based on the feedback that we got back from the first playtesting session, we realized that our game was very player friendly. The enemies were easy to kill and the obstacles that we had were not causing any damage to the player when they hit them. We also got feedback regarding our sounds, Mika suggested that […]

Game Design journal 5

Mikael Ferroukhi
Date 08/03/18
 
During the production of my game Umibozu, me and my team has been through some heavy brainstorming sessions where we would decide what are the best ideas and solutions we can find to make our game the most enjoyable and close to his original aesthetic, all of this while keeping in mind our capacity and limitations to produce code and art.
The problem is that when you stay for too long with a group of 6 people and that […]

Blog Post 5 – Playtesting

Playtesting has for our group been an experience that comes with a mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, its been a great experience to see people enjoying themselves while playing our game, and of course it feels great to receive positive feedback. On the other hand, we’ve during both of the playtesting sessions encountered bugs (not the buzzing kind) that we previously had never seen before. Luckily they haven’t rendered the game completely unplayable, but it still annoyed all […]

To test or detest? That is the question

Hello everyone, this will probably a slightly shorter blog post since it’s about how my workflow and priorities has been affected by the feedback gained through the playtesting. Throughout the playtesting we got very few comments on the art in general, and most of what we got was that it looked good – there are however two artistic things that have found their way into the game faster because of the feedback we got.
Well technically 3; During the alpha […]

The power of playtesting

At the start of the project, we decided to make some fundamental changes to the mechanics. Among other things, we changed the way the player moved. I have talked about this in an earlier post so I will keep things short, but the general gist was that we wanted to make the player feel like he/she was on an actual boat. We achieved this by having the boat rotate on an axis instead of instantly strafing left and right as […]

Feedback Implementation

So I made a previous post about how i approached gathering feedback from the play-testing sessions, this time i will write about how that feedback influenced our game.
Now the first thing I need to make clear is that the feedback has barely impacted anything major in our game that already exists and I’ll try to explain why. The biggest reason is usually because of a shift of focus on what is worked on. For example; from the latest play-testing session […]

The virgin alpha playtest vs. the chad beta playtest

Ignore for a moment, if you will, the title that will probably be outdated by the time you read this, and listen to my small ditty about the playtests, the steps taken in both of them and the differences between the two.
For our alpha playtest, our build was rather minimal, we had 1 type of enemy, one type of power-up (which was later scrapped entirely) and randomly generated levels. It was also before we introduced the mechanics of the fog […]

Week #5 – Using playtesting during development

Iterative testing is a fundamental part of Agile methodology. When Agile is applied to games we end up with playtesting our games constantly, both internally within our teams, and externally in organized playtesting sessions with other students or dedicated testers. The main reasoning for testing early and often when developing games is to see if planned mechanics work as intended and deliver the intended reaction from the Player. Added benefits include detecting bugs, thematic issues, and seeing whether art assets […]

Insight #5 – Playtesting and Feedback

This week I will comment on some of the feedback we received from the rest of the students during our alpha and beta playtesting sessions and how we approached the design of the game after that. This is a long one, so go get a cup of tea!
Alpha
For our Alpha presentation we found a table that was in one of the ends of a major flow of traffic, thanks to this we received a substantial amount of player feedback and […]