Playtests & Feedback
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Playtesting is an important thing in part of any game development project to ensure a quality product, and without it you are designing and iterating in the dark. This can also be an example of what happens when playtests don’t go exactly as planned, which was what happened in our (Team Vampire’s) case. Over the course of the production for Umibozu, we had to playtests which happened with a varying level of success. The Alpha only suffered from some minor issues due to minor unforeseen bugs, however the Beta was a different story as we suffered a major set-back over the weekend before the playtest while doing GitHub migration for the project which resulted in a broken build and troublesome back-ups. We did manage to salvage the build and make it playable enough for the playtest. It may have been playable but the errors had certainly wreaked havoc on the build we presented and there were many flaws included in it. During both playtests we had two computers set up with the game and a playtest survey with questions about the player’s experience, feel of mechanics and visuals of vital elements of the Umibozu concept such as the mist. Most of the Alpha playtest response received revealed average scores and a variety of comments ranging from coherent and concise feedback to smaller percentage of useless jokes and incoherent sentence. We reviewed all of these comments and made iterations based on what we had gathered through the data, and worked toward the Beta with that in mind. As mentioned above, the Beta did not go as intended, and due to the issues we suffered with the build, it wasn’t what we wanted to present to playtesters and I fear the remaining bugs and issues that came along with the build may have diluted what we were really trying to discover, which was to see if the iterations we had made from the Alpha had been successful and increased the quality of the overall experience in the game. However, we saw a drop in most of the scores in the survey and more negative comments. This was to be expected due to the state of the build and as a result it is hard to know whether the actual iterations made prior to the build breaking were improvements or not. We did however review the Beta playtest and attempt our best to see what we could gather from it to base our next iterations upon. While the playtests have provided helpful information to iterate upon, this shows the importance of being well-prepared with back-ups (even outside of GitHub’s version control).   |