Development blog 5: Playtesting
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Good morning all. As one of the artist in group Zombie. I am excited to present you my 5th development blog- the playtesting. This time, I will talk about how has playtesting affected the development in our Exploration game – Umibozu. The development of Umibozu has been through 2 playtestings. We hade our 1st playtesting in Alpha and the 2nd one in Beta. What happened in a playtesting was that our game designer interviewed and handed out surveys to classmates who have played Umibozu. He took note of feedbacks he received from different players and interviewed them shortly afterward. I can not remember all the questions in our surveys, but I remembered that all our questions were quite specific – It usually questions the players an exact uncertainty in our game design, for example, does the art assets in Umibozu narrate the aesthetic of exploration. We took in mostly yes or no answers for absolute certainty and we interviewed on players who answered negatively toward Umibozu. Instead of handing out vague questions such as from one to ten, how would you rate our game, we made sure every single unpopular feature was explained by the players with reasoning. It took us a lot of work, however, we believed that only in this way are we able to pinpoint the mistakes we were making and correct them accordingly. Things didn’t go perfectly well during the playtestings though. Our game was still in a testing state so many features weren’t implemented while our game was tested. Most people suggested features and improvements that were worked on already. We spent times to explain again and again to every single player who played our game that we are working on these features and we knew exactly what to do. However, players could only pinpoint the most obvious bad designs or flaws in our game which are the unimplemented features/assets. Incompletion of our game cost us the 2 opportunities to receive truly meaningful feedbacks so the playtestings didn’t really help us as much as we hoped for. I do not think that the playtesting was worth of the time to do before all core mechanics were done. Testers’ focus was shifted towards incompletion way too heavily since almost every yes or no question for our player was answered with, for example, “it worked fine, but the biggest problem in your game is actually the sprite, you don’t have the sprite”! Now you may ask, how has playtesting affected the development? The answer is we spent more times in making sprites! I totally understand how playtesting could help the development of our game, we simply didn’t prepare it well enough. That concluded my 4th blog. In the end, as always, Thank you for following the development of Umibozu.  |