Blog Post 5 – Playtesting
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Playtesting is often an extremely important part in game development and many huge changes can be made to games after playtesting. Some ideas may seem good on paper but when you try them out in the game they suddenly don’t fit at all. Some games have been completely changed based on playtesting alone. Playtesting for our group was nothing like this. We have been behind schedule for both playtesting sessions and this made it hard to get good and valuable feedback. Our game for the first playtest was almost nothing like the game is now. We had made enough to get into alpha but almost everything was not working as intended. Most of the feedback we got were things we had already planned to do. We created our survey in a way we thought could help us even though the game was not anything like what we had planned. The survey ended up confusing the players and we got no good feedback from the first playtest. The second playtest was similar but the big difference here was that the game had more art assets and a level. We got the same feedback as the first playtest. Our programmer had been sick so we behind on a lot of code work. Some programmers that played our game decided to help us and explain how we should do the code to fix some of the issues. This was the most helpful part of the second playtest. Overall the playtest did almost nothing for us. Our group have felt that our game has not been ready for playtest during both sessions. This is not good at all since we could have gotten some very valuable feedback if our game was ready and worked like we wanted it to work. The things we are changing and iterating now are things we could have changed back then. Playtesting is an extremely important thing to do when creating games. The fact that we didn’t have good playtesting sessions has made us forced to make some blind decisions.  |