Second playtesting – pre Beta
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Hi! In my previous blog, I was writing about a sprint between Alpha presentation and pre-Beta playtesting, and how we decided to freeze some features, and what was implemented and improved during it. And then came the playtest prior to Beta. It was Monday, the 26th of February this year. The teams occupied the tables and set up their games. I had a feeling, that this time it was much more relaxed than the first time. Probably, because of more experience of the groups and the latter stage of the project, having more and improved features and simply, more reason to be satisfied or proud. In our case, there were sounds, the bride movement, improved level.
The playtesting Everything went smooth. Setting two laptops for a play and two for the feedback. And a lot of players playing. Almost thirty. And again, good response and a lot of suggestions. So, what was the feedback like? For the sake of the length of this article, I’m going to focus more on the feedback related to the aesthetic goal of our game, which is – stress. Att question, “How difficult did you find the game to be?” only 17% of players answered that it was easy. ( on the scale of 1-10, they marked under 5). Mostly, because they felt that it was possible to run far in the level without shooting or engaging the enemies. But then, further up there was a lot of enemies; too much to use that same tactic and then, they would die. In fact, only two players passed the level to the end. The players who found the game too difficult (74 %) were stating that there were too many enemies and didn’t get used to the mechanics of reloading and limited bullets. Instructions were written on the paper beside the laptop, to which majority of the players didn’t pay attention. Over 70% of players felt stressed ( on a scale of 1-10, they rated 6+). The bride mechanics sadly didn’t contribute to it ( it was significantly improved after the testing, implementing the rubber- banding). The progress bar also didn’t contribute to the stress; on contrary the omission of it did raise the stress because the players couldn’t know how far they went and how much longer they have to “suffer”. All in all, we were pretty satisfied with the playtest and there was not much things left to implement for the final version. But, that is another topic to cover in the next blog. Stay good and I’ll catch you next time.
Group Hastur “Base”
The groups setting up their games  |
