5SD064 – Game Design Blog 08/03
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The effects of Playtesting Hello yet again! This week I will be writing about the effects that the sessions of playtesting had on our game, Beelonging. During the course we had the opportunity to let other developers from the other teams, as well as the professors at the university, play and try out our game. There were two sessions, Alpha playtesting and Beta playtesting. The point of playtesting is to let players who have no previous experience of the game play it and give critique feedback. This feedback is then used to further improve the game for the future. Playtesting is used all throughout the industry, because it offers the unique perspective of outsiders. If you are the developer of a game you will have knowledge of every little mechanic, and every little trick to easier kill certain enemies and so on. Therefore, it can be difficult for the developer to fully realize how difficult or balanced the game may be to the crowd at large. During the development of a game, the product is most often cut into three main parts – Alpha, Beta and Final/Release version. It may also be further cut into pre-alpha. During the course we’ve heard several times about the importance of the alpha. The mechanics that are in the alpha IS the game. The rest is simply balancing and polishing. But if the alpha isn’t fun, the final release version won’t be fun either. So, during these playtesting sessions our group set up the game on two laptops for other people to play. We let each playtester play as long as they want and then we ask them questions that we as developers felt were important. Our group knew that many teams were to use online surveys that their testers put their answers in. We wanted to make a different approach so we decided to talk to the testers directly and then write down their feedback. This proved succesful, and we recieved a lot of great feedback. For example, the health of the spider and wasp were changed since they were too strong and a lot of visual and audio feedback were added in the game to better communicate certain in-game events to the Player. We then summarized our feedback in a google docs document, excerpts from the Alpha and Beta playtesting sessions can be seen below:
I felt that the playtesting sessions were extremely useful and were the main reasons for a lot of design decisions and changes made throughout the development phases. // Karl Lindkvist  |
