Dev Blog #5 -Playtesting
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Hello again! This week I’ll talk about my team’s experience with the playtesting sessions we’ve had during this project. We attended both sessions, though we found little value in the second one and would rather have spent that time working on the game in order to complete it for the beta. I know other team felt the same way, but we still took the playtesting seriously and had a survey for testers to fill out. On both occasions we had an extra group meeting before the playtesting where we discussed what we wanted feedback on and what questions we wanted answered. I think this is necessary preparation in order to get the most out of the testing and the answers we received have mostly been very helpful to the development process. The not so useful feedback was of the one word kind, namely someone stated something was good or bad with no explanation as to why, which gives us no direction on how to improve the feature. After each session had been concluded, we had another group meeting where we discussed the feedback and how to address it. Some feedback from players on things they didn’t like was not addressed however, since changing these things to fit what these specific people wanted would go against what we were actually trying to do with the game. Though, if we were trying to do something specific that multiple people complained about, we would take an extra look at it do decide whether we should adhere to the players’ wishes or not. The last point on our survey, for both playtesting sessions, was general thoughts and opinions, and it was on this point that we got the most useful pointers that helped us improve the game. The effect playtesting had on us and our game has been overwhelmingly positive, despite long days leaving us completely exhausted. Playtesting has many benefits, one being the actual testing, where we see if everything works as we wanted and if testers play as we intended. Another benefit is that the playtesters provide a fresh perspective to the game, helping us realise things we hadn’t thought about or making us understand features differently. It is my belief that everyone working on a game needs to playtest it for the reasons I stated above. It was certainly helpful to us, and it proved to me what we were told earlier of games tending to be made more difficult than they are on release, which I didn’t fully believe. However, after seeing the majority of testers struggle with the game we as developers had no problems with (several of us had very little difficulty completing our expert mode even), I was convinced and decided we had to make it a bit easier, without making it look easier of course. Overall, playtesting helped us see things from another angle, provided feedback to our features and answered the questions we had about the experience of playing our game.  |