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Ignore for a moment, if you will, the title that will probably be outdated by the time you read this, and listen to my small ditty about the playtests, the steps taken in both of them and the differences between the two.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 […]

Critique 1: Alexander Sinn

https://shirovfx.wordpress.com/2018/02/08/water/
 
Your article is well constructed and most importantly: concise. Easy to read, grammatically correct and allows the reader to get a clear understanding of what went through your mind when deciding upon how you want the game to actually look at his final state.
Nevertheless it would have been interesting to get at the beginning a quick explanation on what Omibozu actually is and why the folklore around it makes sense towards your design choice.
Also an image of your […]

Blog Post #5 – Playtesting

Playtesting has ultimately shaped our entire process due to how we tried to apply feedback received in both playtesting sessions to our game. Our first alpha playtesting session of Behemoth was the most informative- in the early phases of Behemoth, the issues were very obvious right as we started the playtest. However, as time goes on, it becomes increasingly more complicated to determine where the issues lie as the complexity of the game increases through the development process.
In the alpha […]

5. Playtesting’s effect on game development

Hello there once again, my name is Carl and in this weeks blog post, I will be talking about the effect playtesting has had on my groups development of the game ”Depth”.
A simple description of playtesting is that it is a session where you, as a developer, present your game to a small ”audience” that is going to try out your game, and then after they have played your game, they will proceed to give you feedback. It can be […]

The Boaty way of playtesting

As an artist it is very important to make players read the visuals meaning and how they make the player feel. It is very essential to get feedback from testers on the response the game gives to the player.
By using survey and talking to the testers there was given a lot of great feedback. Orally gives more in depth of what the testers actually mean, if they for example do not have the feeling the game has a mysterious […]

Player Feedback

So, playtesting.
I worked as a playtester for a while on a game company called ”Zoink!” who made the recently released game ”Fe” – and because of this I fully realize the importance of feedback from anyone who is not directly involved in the project. Being able to swallow your pride, take and process critique is something that any game developer will inevitably have to learn. Being a graphics-student, however, leaves me with less criticism than I might have wanted. Usually, […]