Testing, testing.
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Now we are not far away from the deadline of having to present the finished game. Throughout the development process we have used some tools to help us. Other than scrum (which I have described the advantages of in another blogpost), there has been another very important thing that we have had to our help: playtesting. Without the valuable feedback from the playtesting, our game would probably be very difficult, because when you develop a game you playtest it yourself over and over, playing it a lot more than the typical player would. You also know the mechanics of the game exactly, the precise movement and attacks of the animations, so then you might find it easier than it actually is. As I myself noticed, when I was playtesting the games of some other groups, many of the games where very difficult and I had a hard time to actually try out the game because I could only play it for a very short time before dying, therefore I ended up playing just the start of the game over and over, totally missing out on the rest of the game and then they wouldn’t get any feedback on that. Thus, it is important to think about that, and to ask the play testers about what they thought of the difficulty of the game.
Two times, one before the alfa and one before the beta, we have had playtesting. About 20-30 playtesters on each opportunity. Many of the playtesters were the same people both playtesting sessions. However, our games primary target audience is kids, 8-9 year olds. The playtesters were our classmates, roughly our own age, (around 20) not our intended audience. It would probably be good to have had some kids try our game, but sadly we had no opportunity to do that. One of the changes that we decided to make to the game after the 1st playtesting session: Giving the player a reason to use the swarm function (because the player felt like there were no reason to use it). One of the changes that we decided to make after the 2nd playtesting session: Give the player a reason not to use the swarm function (now we had over did it, and using the swarm function was most efficient in every situation and there was no reason not to use it). Apparently we had over-tweaked it. Had we only had 1 playtesting, we would probably not have known this. This makes me think that it is not only important to have playtesting, but important to have playtesting more than one time throughout the game developing process. Playtesting is very important. But not having the playtesters in your target audience makes it a bit more difficult to design player centrically, because you design it from feedback from players who aren’t actually your players in the end. Or, who knows, this might end up as a game most appealing to 20-25 year-olds… Our classmates actually seemed to enjoy it very much when they played it.
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