Blog 5
Working with playtests and feedbackSo the topic for this week is playtests, and for that I will tell you how we have playtested our game as well as how that affected.  For the Alpha-playtest we had one enemy, one power-up and the player who can move and shoot. At this stage we had not yet implemented the fog system which is a key part of our game concept. Therefore it was difficult to ask questions regarding the games aesthetic feeling. Our method for recording the feedback was by recording the voices of our testers while they were answering the questions. This was done after they had played through the Alpha build a few times.
The Beta build had two enemies, four different power-ups, one non characteristic obstacle object, the complete fog system where objects are hidden until you use your flashlight on them as well as the player who could move, aim and shoot their gun, toggle and aim their flashlight and activate collected power-ups. This version featured two distinct stages as well as a short scripted tutorial to introduce the games mechanics to the player.  For the Beta-playtest we decided to use a google sheet to record the feedback instead. The questions asked can be seen below here.
The results we got here were mostly positive but one thing that was clear was that the tutorial needed to be improved. It didn’t show the text for long enough and some players would leave the tutorial with little to no battery left which made the game very difficult to complete. We also received some feedback that our shooting mechanic was hard to understand. Due to this feedback we made the tutorial text stay longer on the screen and the tutorial in general take slightly longer time. We changed the battery to slowly replenish if it was below a certain threshold and made so that the power-up you gain in the tutorial would always restore your battery. We also updated the aiming cursor for the gun to better tell the player how it worked. Overall both of our playtest sessions in larger groups gave very positive results and large amounts of feedback which helped us distinguish more clearly between the problems or opinions that were shared by a large group of testers, and the ones that were one-offs. It did however make it so that analysing all the data took slightly longer.  All in all I am very happy with our results and I feel like we have been able to make some important changes and polish our game much better due to the playtests.  |
