Playtesting – how did it affect our development?

The game me and my group decided to make was Umibozu. We tweaked the theme of the game and put the sailor into a swamp. You might remember us as the Umibozu game with a swarm of alligators heading your way.

For the first playtest, we didn’t really have much to ask in the questionnaire people answered after each playtest, as we were barely done with everything needed for the alpha. We basically only had a moving boat, one power-up and enemies that would kill you on touch. The win condition at that time was to survive the swarm of enemies until they wouldn’t spawn anymore. With that being said our questions were pretty open as we tried to get feedback on the things that was the core mechanics at that time, basically movement of the boat, the enemies spawn rate and their movement speed.
The feedback that we got were very diverse, some people loved boat movement while other disliked it, the same goes to the enemy interactions. Although, there were a few more that wanted a slower moving boat and reduced enemy spawn-rate, vast majority thought that the movement speed of the enemies was good.
With this new information, we made the boat feel more “boaty” by slowing down the boat and adding a small delay time for the boat to gradually move faster after you press down the arrow keys.
The spawn rate of enemies was lowered to a point where we thought would be good for the second playtest.

For the second playtest, we had more features to test, therefore our questionnaire had a few more questions this time. We realized that the things we got feedback from the first playtest and that we fixed were not issues anymore as the vast majority liked the changes. This time around we had to tweak the fog, the reload time of our weapon and the projectile speed for our bullet. Our testers wanted a more realistic looking fog, quicker reload time and faster projectile speed. The reload time and faster projectile was an easy fix as our programmer just tweaked some numbers in his code. After that, the game felt a lot smoother, even for us, the developers that didn’t even think of changing those attributes. After some work from our graphic designer and programmer we got a better-looking fog as well.

The playtesting as definitely helped us make the right changes needed to make our game better. Everything we got from the playtests was suitable to develop our game further.

About August Demirsson

2017 Game Design

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