Playtesting and Aetherial
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Playtesting has had a huge impact on our workflow and design decisions. More specifically once we started getting feedback from people who actually played our game we started to realize what problems it had that we hadn’t thought about before. This might be due to a lack of Quality Assurance within our group, but I think it is also always important to get a different opinion from someone outside the development team. This is not as true for the second playtesting session as for the last one, as we didn’t have many changes between the two. This is mostly due to there being only one and a half sprint worth of developing time between the two playtesting sessions. The second playtest felt quite useless as we mostly got feedback on obvious bugs that were in the game and that we didn’t have time to fix yet. However there were some weird interactions and difficult to replicate bugs that were only discovered in the first place by having the game playtested. Another reason why playtesting has improved our workflow is because it forced us to work more oriented on playability. Usually when we had a task, we got it done and left polishing to later. However in the demo builds we tried to make our mechanics as smooth as possible, which lead to us having a bunch of polishing done before the final two weeks. Playtesting didn’t only give us useful feedback from other groups, but it also showed us what other groups were doing with their games. Playing the games of other groups gave us the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and successes. This gave us a better understanding of their struggles than just talking to their designers would have, since they would have a different point of view when it comes to talking about their own game and its problems. Overall I’d say that Playtesting, as it was done during the Shoot ’em Up project, has helped us a lot, it would have been even more helpful if we had an additional week between the Alpha and the Beta Playtest. Besides that I am very happy with our results.
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