Blog #5 Playtesting
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Testing you game is something that’s really important to do while creating a game. As developers it’s very easy to stare yourself blind on a project you’ve been working on for a long time. Getting someone’s clear eyes on mind to help you see flaws and strengths of your product can help you stay focused on what’s really important. As well as finding unseen errors. In this projects we’ve had two playtests so far, one before alpha- and one before beta release. In the pre-alpha playtest we did not have much of a product, really. But the player could run around and shoot stuff that would shoot him back. Even with such a small product to playtest, we still got a lot of constructive feedback. For example we had a lot of answers that were saying the game felt unfair since the enemies shot you before you could see them.
We hadn’t put any thought into the distance of the camera yet, as that was planned for later, but with this feedback we had an easier time once we got to that point, to make sure to satisfy the complains. The pre-beta was definitely a more important playtest. We had put a playable game together by now, and the feedback was more applicable to the final product. Most feedback was aimed towards the balancing. The game was too hard and unfair at times. I wish we had done a better job giving a more proper effort to balance the game before the playtest so that the feedback would have been more spread out on other things. But we were working until the last second before it begun so there wasn’t all that much time. The feedback that impacted our group the most was around the ethics of the game. We were meant to have our avatar, Brad, regret his marriage just before it was about to end and running away. The church would turn hellish and the wedding guests would turn into devilish creatures trying to hunt him down. But the state of our game during the beta playtest only had the bride and the female guest enemy. The feedback we got on that was that the question “Why is Brad running away from the women?”. Even if the end product of our game was not supposed to look like that, that was the game we had at the current moment, which means that it’s what the player sees. Even more, with the little time we had left after the pre-beta playtesting we wouldn’t have had time to implement the male guest enemy. Therefore we decided to make a change to the narrative behind the game into a setting more fitting of the game we had created. Sometimes you can’t make excuses for what the game was meant to be and instead face the fact that what you have in front of you is the game you’ve created. And if you don’t have time to change what that game is, your original idea might have to be altered or changed in the end to fit your game. Thanks for reading.
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