Game Design Blog #5
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In this blog, I will be talking about how playtesting sessions have affected the development of our game. In the first playtest made for our game to be played by random people from our programs. It was observed that people after a shoot-em up game were kind of not satisfied with our main playable ship, is a slow moving(including slow turns) entity and even with a slow harpoon turret with a slower flashlight. But our reasoning behind this was to stay close to the aesthetic goal of the of the original design document of the game which is “being mysterious”. Thus caused by the aesthetic goal we had made an early decision that the gameplay would be slow, to make the player find roam around and look around the gameplay area to be able to understand and learn the situation rather than just going around fast and missing things. Thus this critique of the players didn’t make us change the slow gameplay but only made us make a slight increase in reverse speed. The other complaint or critique was the turret turning speed, including the flashlight, where the player move the slow turning turret towards the enemy to aim at them, which meant that it was needed to concentrate on the turret as there were no crosshair available. Caused by the limitation of our knowledges of how it exactly worked and the frustration caused to the playtesters, the speed of the harpoon turn was increased to the real-time speed of the cursor. Yet we still kept the flashlight at the slow speed as said before said the game needed to be mysterious, so the flashlight needs to be slow to make the player guess and perhaps shoot before seeing either if they shot a powerup, an enemy or an artifact. One of the more minor complaints would be that the game needs more tutorial for the player to at least understand the basics. Thus more tutorials hints were added making, most of them in the beginning and even when pausing the game in case of the player forgetting some controls.  |
