Post #5 – Playtesting

By: Erik Rosenberg / March 08, 2018 /
Program: Project Management
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What?

Since the very beginning of the ongoing course we have conducted three types of playtesting:

(a) Playtesting conducted by the members of team Siren (i.e. the developers of the game)

(b) Online playtesting (previously mentioned in this post) via this website.

(c) Course-related playtesting workshops

How?

(a) As well as (b) has been ongoing continuously, on a daily basis and communicated to the team either (a) by the team itself or (b) via e-mails/google forms.

(c) has happened on two occasions so far, on Monday (12/2-2018) which I wrote about in this post and Monday (26/2-2018), the latter will be addressed in the post you are currently reading.

Even though (c) only has been done twice, we receive so much feedback at the same time, with the same setting for each tester that it serves as a solid foundation for design decisions, with (a) and (b) complementing it.

Results from the playtesting conducted 26/2-2018 (c)

We (Group Siren) were unsure on whether it would be more interesting for players to earn energy and then consume said energy by using abilities/special attacks and thus allow for players devising their own preferred tactics or restrict the use of said abilities to single uses of abilities whenever the player found managed to catch a pick-up with the corresponding ability.

In order to make an informed decision we set up two versions of the game (v1) using abilities by spending energy and (v2) with pick-ups.

We had each tester play both versions and then fill out a form with the following questions:

  1. How many times did you play version 1? (Spend energy to use power-ups)
  2. How many times did you play version 2? (Power-ups as pick-ups)
  3. Which version did you prefer?
After which they got to fill out a number of free-text questions to give more general feedback.
Result
Answers:
  1. 1: 38,9%, 3: 27,8%, 4: 22,2% (the remaining 11,1% did not play or did not want to answer this question)
  2. 1: 22,2%, 2: 33,3%, 3: 33,3% (the remaining 11,14% did not play or did not want to answer this question)
  3. (v1): 30,7%, (v2): 61,1% (the remaining 8,2% never used or did not understand how to use abilities)
Conclusion
Our testers prefer playing (v1) over (v2) once they figure out how to use the abilities, the problem that remained at this point was to try and teach new testers or players in a timelier manner, which we have done using a tutorial level that I write about in this post.

About Erik Rosenberg

2017 Project Management
Tags: 2017