5. Playtesting’s effect on game development

Hello there once again, my name is Carl and in this weeks blog post, I will be talking about the effect playtesting has had on my groups development of the game ”Depth”.
A simple description of playtesting is that it is a session where you, as a developer, present your game to a small ”audience” that is going to try out your game, and then after they have played your game, they will proceed to give you feedback. It can be everything from good and bad critique, small changes that should be made and what they would prefer.

During our development we have had two playtesting sessions, both being organized by the school. The first session was planned on the 12th of Febuary, where every group had to present an alpha, a very rough and unpolished version of their games. To be able to get as much data from this playtesting as possible, everyone in the group took turns noting down the way the testers played our game and their reaction, and the second way to recieve data from the testing was through a Google Questionaire, where the testers could fill in their answers and general feeling about the game.

(Left) Some of the Alpha Playtesting notes and (Right) a questionaire response

With the help of these notes and questionires, we could see what we had to change in order to make this game as good as possible. Some of the things we took notice was that the testers thought the camera was bad, the level design was bland, that the pick-up was not distinguishable from the enemies, that the player character was too slow and that they didn’t really feel any pressure while playing. Which was obviously a huge flaw on our part since the entire game is buildt around the sensation of pressure and survival. With these things in mind, the group sat down after the testing-session to discuss this and that these issues obviously had to improve.
The next playtesting session was on the 5th of March, so we had roughly around three weeks to change and improve our game. During this period we changed the camera, made the pick-up more distinguishable, changed the speed of the submarine, made the level design more intresting and made game feel more intense and ”pressurable”, and other minor changes. By doing this, we recieved a lot of praise and positive feedback of our game this time!

(Left) Alpha summary and (Right) Beta Summary

As shown with the summary picture above, the feedback we got from the alpha playtesting session helped us tremendously and the same goes for the beta testing.

So I would say that playtesting has affected my group in a very postive way!

Thanks for reading!

– Group T, Carl HvB

About Carl Hvarfvenius Blomgren

2017 Game Design

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