Play testing the mystery
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During development we’ve had two play testing sessions. The first one was in a quite early stage of development, which meant we were mostly focusing on basic game mechanics. During this play test we only had basic movement, shooting and random spawned enemies, which limited the feedback we were able to receive. The feedback was mostly related to the looks of the game, with the flashlight, the mist and the vibe is set. The second play test was between the alpha and beta build, which meant we were much further along in development. However we had still not had time to focus that much on balancing and level design. We were working on the level transitions, preparing for the boss battle, and making the game play fit with the story line of the game. In order to get feedback on those elements we decided to remove the loosing conditions of the game so that players would actually get to the story points of the game. This was probably a mistake since we missed out on a opportunity to test out difficulty level and our communication towards the player.
Now that the boss is done, and the game is near completion, it would be nice to have some more play testing. I think it would have been beneficial to have one additional play testing session, or just delaying one of the two we had. It would have been very useful to have a session after the Beta presentation since that is when everything is coming together. To remedy that we have decided to make sure to use the play testing group on slack, so that we can get feedback on the entire product and the game balancing of the “finished” game. The points to focus on during these play tests will be visual communication to the player of whats going on, game balancing during levels, and overall difficulty of the game. If we would have had the play testing affecting out planning more from the beginning we would probably have prioritized our work a bit differently. However I don’t really consider this to be a problem since it’s not hard to find play testers even if it’s not a scheduled session.  |
