How has playtesting affected/improved our game?

By: Axel Halén / March 08, 2018 /
Program: Game Design
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What have we iterated using playtesting?

We used our first playtesting to inform us of things that we might not have thought of, rather than things that we already knew did not work or needed more development.

One of the questions that we had asked the playtesters was:
What was your least favourite moment or interaction?
And these were some of the answers:

  • Sometimes the controls felt a bit unresponsive
  • No indication of being hit, too easy to beat
  • Being overwhelmed by enemies that you can’t really dodge

What we did with this information was to plan ahead for the next scrum planning.
And we dealt with these problems as soon as we could to prevent any future problems where we would get similar responses to this question. 

What steps did we take to adress these answers?

The ship controls felt unresponsive to some and what we needed to do was change this quickly.
What I had done was to write a User-Story to adress that, and provided it to our programmer so that we could have a discussion about the boat movement.
This is the user story:

As the ship

I will move slowly and floaty

Because i want to emulate the feeling of a flying ship in the air


This helped the programmer to test different ways of programming the controls, and eventually make the ship feel much better in the game.


What we also needed to fix was some kind of indication of being hit, and what we did was to implement a Health-Bar



And this fixed the issue with no indication of damage for the players, which was a huge problem at that stage. 

And the problem about being overwhelmed by enemies was fixed rather easily by me making a level design for the game, and this is how I did it. 

I created an easy sheet to be able to understand how the enemies would spawn within the levels. and it went as follows: 

Level 1

  • 1 G 
  • 3 G
  • 2 G + 1 P
  • 2 P +  3 P
  • End of level screen – You pass the portal and proceed to the next level.

G = Glaucus, P = Pufferfish, R = Ray, T= Tangler. (These are the enemies within the game)


And this is how we were able to not have any overwhelming amount of enemies. since previously the enemies spawned forever without any end, which made the game unnecessarily difficult.

And this is how playtesting affected our game for the better. 

About Axel Halén

2017 Game Design
Tags: 2017