Game Design 2: Blogpost #5, Playtesting
|
For this blog post I will be writing about how playtesting has affected the making of our game. Throughout the Game Design 2 course there have been a total of 3 planned playtesting sessions (one of which was the final playtesting before the final deadline of the course), as a group we decided to make the most use of these as possible. For this we decided upon questions we wanted answered beforehand and made questionnaires that the playtesters would be able to answer after playing our game. In addition to this we also regularly tested the game ourselves to discus the difficulty among other things. Finally Group Siren also chose to put the playable betas of the game on a website where other students (or anybody really) could play the game whenever they wanted and fill in a comment where they could give any feedback they wanted. This website was also written about on a playtesting channel on the official slack of the program to let people know it existed. In my opinion all of these different types of playtesting have greatly shaped the final release of our game which seems to have been a net positive for it. One of the main things that was shaped by playtesting was the difficulty of the game in general and it seems that we managed to strike a very good difficulty curve where players in the final playtesting session (including multiple teachers) commented that they felt the game sufficiently taught them the mechanics and let them get a feel for the game before overwhelming them with too many or too strong enemies. The game itself in the final release has 4 levels including the tutorial (which I will refer to as level 0). Level 1 and 2 slowly increase in difficulty before level 3 really tests the player’s skill by forcing them to take out enemies quickly or risk being overwhelmed (I write more about this in blog #4). Level 0 is made to be virtualy unfailable unless you actively try too so that we can slowly introduce the most important mechanics to the player before the main game begins. To make it so that players didnt need to spend time replaying this in concurent replays we made a button to skip the tutorial in the “play” menu (which you can see below). From what I saw during the final playtesting session it seems like about 50% or so of the testers managed to beat the final level which to me feels like a fair balance. Of course there were some people who thought that the game was too hard but there were also some that commented the opposite and said that they found it too easy so these results seem very balanced to me.  |
