Playtesting

First playtest :

The first playtest for the alpha was an important milestone for our group as we had been putting on hold design choises and art syle choice until we would get proper feedback.
When it comes to the art style, we have found that most people enjoyed the black, white and grey palette and found the idea of playing on the pages of a book interesting and that it set our game apart from the other umibozu groups.
From the point I then could take my old assets and color them with grey watercolor and move on to other new assets. From this feedback we also decided to keep the GUI black and white.

The other very important feedback we got was that players didnt realise the crates and barrels were pick ups/power ups and that they were not obstacles to be avoided. That came from the color of them and there non attractive design.

From that feedback I changed the power up to a new design, with flowers to keep the “ink traditional chinese” drawing and I added the icons of the effect of the power ups in the middle of the flower along with some color. It was the first color we used in the game and I decided to keep it yellowish to fit with the light of the boat and the lantern of the GUI.

Here is the change I made to the pick ups :

Second playtest :

The second playtest was helpful in a way that it gave us feedback and QA. Our art style remained appreciated by the players except for the fog shapes that seemed odd to many people in the way it moved and in the way it looked.

We decided to try making it lighter to fit in with the particle effects made in unity and to add a paper texture on it so it would look like it was within the background which is a paper tile and then it looked like this :

But apparently from our programmers feedback it looked too bright and didnt fit in so we scraped the idea

We received feedback that our music was good and immersive.

Playtesting was important to me in order to know which asset and style to scrap and if the direction I was taking was the right one. In term of design we received a lot of feedback that helped us in taking decisions regarding ; our ennemie movement pattern, the goal of the game was now improved to not only discovering a creature but also saving someone from the said creature in order to give a purpose to the player ; the player movement seemed odd so we changed it.

One thing that has been brought up to us during feedback countless times and that we havent solved is that the enemies are very easy to differentiate from the pick ups and also there is no real reason why not to shoot all the appearing fogshapes because u can move on without the pick ups.
I would personnaly think that we need a longer cooldown on the harpoon so that the player can not spam shoot everything on the screen, I would also want to change fogshapes for simple patterns on the background tile so that the ennemies would look as if they were under the paper and they would be difficult to spot until the light was cast upon them.

Those are things I will bring up to our group but I think it might be too late into the process to make these changes.

About marie colin

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