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Playtesting has ultimately shaped our entire process due to how we tried to apply feedback received in both playtesting sessions to our game. Our first alpha playtesting session of Behemoth was the most informative- in the early phases of Behemoth, the issues were very obvious right as we started the playtest. However, as time goes on, it becomes increasingly more complicated to determine where the issues lie as the complexity of the game increases through the development process.
In the alpha playtest, many of our problems stemmed from the controls and placement of the player avatar. As a recap, in Behemoth you control a large ship which is situated on the left side of the screen. It is immovable, but you have control of a shield and a large cannon to fight and defend yourself from enemies. There was an issue in this design as there was a huge disconnect between the player’s avatar and the action. Many of the play-testers were spam-clicking the mouse because they were unaware when the cannon as ready to fire again. At the time, there was an indicator (the color of the cannon changed from red after firing, then slowly faded back to blue, to simulate overheating), but it was on the left side of the screen, where the player was never looking. As time went on we corrected this problem by adding a reloading animation on the player’s cursor (which was also not present in Alpha). Furthermore, since the cannon was located on the left side of the screen while the action took place on the right, it was very irritating to know where you were actually aiming your cannon, despite the addition of an aiming cursor. The drag of the cannon makes this an unreliable way to actually tell where your projectile will go. To remedy this, I suggested adding a sort of “flashlight” to point from the cannon to show exactly where it was aimed. This way, the player can tell where they are pointed without even looking at left side of their screen. Our next playtest that included these features saw little to no complaint about these issues anymore.
About Amanda Cohen
2017 Graphics
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