Playtesting
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Playtesting has for sure been one of the more interesting parts of the Game Design course. I mean the reason I would assume most people applied for this course is to obtain the skills necessary for a job in the video game industry, and while lectures and course literature is nice, I feel like the few opportunities we get to apply the skills we’ve learnt is when everything really sinks in. Playtesting is precisely one such opportunity and now that I have gotten to experience what it is like to design a playtest and recieve feedback from it, I feel like I understand its significance that much more. The feedback we recieved was overall positive and there wasn’t anything which would make us change up our core design. However we did get one piece of feedback which really stood out to me. A few of our testers pointed out to us that the powerup we had designed looked more like an obstacle, and many players avoided it for this reason. This was really surprising to me since I hadn’t considered that to be a possibility. Our game, Depth, is built on aesthetic goals like fear and stress. When these kinds of emotions are so central to the aesthetic, it can become difficult to make an accurate judgement of how to convey them properly, especially since the developers themselves may get easily desensitized to the contents of the game. In our playtests I was expecting to primarily get feedback on these topics, however the biggest takeaway for me was the more unexpected feedback. The purpose of a playtest is to find flaws in the game design and understand what the game looks like to the average playerbase. Why this is necessary, is because average players have uncontaminated perspectives, which will help the developers (us) understand how the player interprets the output of the game. Despite the fact that I had understood this before, it still remained my biggest takeaway from the playtest (Reiterating my idea that a theory doesn’t always quite sink in until you’ve seen it in action). To be specific, I was surprised by the fact that players could provide insight into problems which had never even crossed my mind. So in conclusion, I am really glad that we had the opportunity to conduct a playtest. I feel like this experience has shown me that even when the game feels perfect to the developer, there can still be many benefits to a fresh perspective.  |