The blind-eye
Playtesting in all of its variation is an integral part of iterative design. when used well it can help identify problems that were hidden in plain sight. How and when you playtest is of most importance, testing often and testing specifics of your game gives you a greater understanding of your game and its systems. With greater understanding comes greater mastery of your game, which blindsided me to the difficulty and learning curve of me and my team’s game.
Me and my team’s game’s greatest weakness is that the only balancing that it gets comes from me. Now that sounds weird, of course the the person who has studied the most design should know the most about balancing, and while that is true, my eyes for what is hard and for what is easy are tainted. For reference; when I was younger I played semi-professional Call of Duty, right now I am in the top 0.3% of all unranked Rocket League players, and I used to be in the top 4% of ranked players on the server I play on in League of Legends when I took that game seriously. When I play a game a lot, I get good at it, and in the case of balancing my game, it is a detriment.
At the same time that this is happening, my teammates do not play our game that often, even though they can play it anytime they want. I do not get enough feedback from them to know if the game is still too hard or if I have made it too easy.
This is the last challenge in the game, the magnetic looking things on the sides are placeholders for holes (grey) and fires (red). The slightly brighter, red enemies are melee-enemies and the darker ones are shooting-enemies. The yellow light is the game’s power-up which the player can use to freeze all enemies and destroy all enemy projectiles in an area.
With all that said, is this too easy, or is it too hard? I know how to get past, but will someone who has never played the game before? Would they even make it all they way there so that I could find out? I simply do not know.
The official tests
I will be honest, the alpha playtest was kind of a joke on our part, and not in a fun way. We were missing our key feature, the Bride, and didn’t know what our test should be about, so we picked some generic questions. What was your least/most favorite moment?were two questions of the five we had. Along with that, we did not bring any mice to the playtest which meant that all of our testers played with a trackpad, which is not ideal.
Coming in to the beta playtest we knew that the game was hard, we did not give ourselves enough time to test the game with the bride in it, and it just so happened that she did not add too much to the game in the state that she was in anyway. We could and should have tested a lot more internally before the beta testing, but we did not, which lead to a lot of fairly redundant information stating that the game was hard. While the game is supposed to make the player feel threatened and stressed most of the time, they felt so for the wrong reasons during the beta test. The game is not meant to be hard, just feel like it.
For the reasons stated above I can say with confidence that we have squandered our playtesting opportunities and the game has taken an unnecessary hit because of it.
I do blame myself for these mistakes as well, I should have asked for my team’s help and I should have reached out to my fellow students for more feedback.
You live and you Learn.
About Daniel Reinsson
2017 Game Design
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