Beta Play Test
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When producing a game it is very important to play test often. It gives you lots of insight and details on what to change, what is fun, what people like or do not like, almost everything! The more you do it, the more you know about your game. And what’s even better is to get someone else to play it too, other people have a fresh mind set which you can use to see flaws or details form someone who has no experience whatsoever with your game. For the Beta play test, we wanted to try all of the features we had in mind. The first one was the ally 1 special ability of throwing grenades and killing almost everything on screen, the second one, ally 2, was going to have the ability to heal you. The purpose of your friends having abilities was to give the player a deeper attachment and need of their friends, making them more willing to protect them and save them, which is basically the point of the game. However, when the time came, we were not ready, we didn’t manage to have the abilities on time for the Beta Play Test, which means we couldn’t make people try them and actually tell us if the abilities were fun or too unbalanced. So, we decided to cut them out of the game. In the end we decided to play test the balance in our game and to see what people thought about it overall. We got great feedback about the player movement and controls. Our controls were simple enough, but not what people actually thought about when they first played. Also, we got some great comments about the friends and how the balance of the enemies and the aid of your friends worked. It was very helpful. After play testing, we tweaked enemy movement and speed, we also changed the controls to what people first impulse was (mouse instead of keyboard), we implemented the final background, which now totally fits the art style, and finally we made the friends feel way more alive! What I’m trying to say is, play test, play test and play test! You never know what you might find, and it doesn’t have to be during the official play testing day, as a team, you can play test your game often, searching for bugs and looking for mistakes, also you can give it to your friends to try out, I’m sure they will have fun!    |