The power of playtesting

At the start of the project, we decided to make some fundamental changes to the mechanics. Among other things, we changed the way the player moved. I have talked about this in an earlier post so I will keep things short, but the general gist was that we wanted to make the player feel like he/she was on an actual boat. We achieved this by having the boat rotate on an axis instead of instantly strafing left and right as well as adding gears. You can read the full detail on the changes in my earlier post.

Along came the first playsession with the class. People were allowed to play other groups’ games and give some candid feedback. We got lucky and got a spot in the middle of the classroom so lots of people got to play, which means that we received a lot of feedback.

We used a questionaire to receive feedback, so after playing, people could leave their feedback in a quick and easy way on the same computer. Among the questions we posed, one of them was ”How boaty was the movement?”, i.e. did you feel like you were controlling a boat?

As you can see, pretty boaty. However, it can allways be improved. When we spoke to participants post-test we found out that something was missing. People thought the movement was sluggish and un-intuitive. We decided to improve it.

Turning.
During the alpha, the turning rate of the ship remained the same no matter what gear the player used. We changed this slightly, now the player will turn sharper when going slowly and make wider turns when going fast. This is something that, to me, felt like a natural feature when playtesting and a no-brainer afterwards. It also gives the player a reason to go into slower gears as it makes it easier to make precise turns and collect those hard-to-get power ups.

Speed.
Some people mentioned that they felt like the ship was too slow. Now, this is very much a question related to how fast everything else is, but what we could change is the difference each gear makes. We gave the top gear a bigger kick to it, faster acceleration and top speed while making the lowest gear slower. We also sped up the reverse gear to make it more useful.

So, that is one way we improved our game. It was important to us to really nail player movement for our game, as it is what the player will be doing most of the time.

About Teodor Huldt

2017 Game Design

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