01-03-2018
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This Monday we had our first playtest since the Alpha preview. This blog post will be about lessons I learned from the feedback my group got from that testing. At first, some of the feedback we got was quite confusing, and some downright offended me as the programmer. People were writing that the attacks didn’t work and that enemies were invincible. And I knew that just wasn’t true! But why were so many people saying the same thing? The answer came in a later comment. ”it was a little unclear that i was doing damage” – unknown tester That was it! People assumed the enemies were a one-hit-kill because they couldn’t see that they were doing damage over time to them. So when the enemy died didn’t know that the enemies were taking damage and just assumed that the flashlight wasn’t hitting the enemies. The mechanic of enemies regenerating health while in the dark was also totally lost on the testers as they had absolutely no way of knowing this. The more I thought about it the more stupid I felt. I had just assumed everybody knew the mechanics of the game just because I knew them. That’s what happens when you spend so much time on a project, I guess. Immediately after playtesting my group had a meeting and it was very clear what had to be done. Animations and sounds for when both enemies and player had to be implemented in order for people to understand what was going on. And scary to think about what would have happened if we wouldn’t have had that playtesting session… And that is what I will bring with me from this week the most: the testers always know best, because after all, they are representing those who will actually play the game.  |