Blog 5 #Playtest survey

During this course we have had 2 playtest sessions with the other groups, one alpha and one beta. Our group has had a setup of 2 computers running the game were people walking by could sit down and play. At each computer we had a team member helping out with questions sense during the alpha our game had 0 tutorials and you needed to alt+f4 to quit and restart. After the testers felt finished they got to fill in a survey we created before the testing sessions, this blog post will go into how we created our surveys and why we picked the questions we used.

our survey always started with one page were the tester could choose to fill in age, gender and other general questions about there gaming habits and experiences. We put this in there so we could check the answers to the rest of the questions with our factual target audience.
If someone who play’s the hardest games the can get there hands on says our game is easy, and someone who never plays our game says its to hard. our game is to hard(according to the concept document the game is created for people who don’t play a lot of games i,e casual gamers). Without this first section in our survey we would have no idea of what kind of player answered our questions and who’s feedback we should focus on if the feedback is conflicting.

For the rest of our survey we had questions related to features that were of great importance to create the feelings we wanted in the game, and to make sure the core mechanics were not annoying to use.
So we have questions like,
“Does it feel like you are controlling a ship?”

“How does the rotation speed of the harpoon turret feel?”
etc.

I think that one of the reasons why our game ended up feeling very good to play was because we choose to use this way of performing our play test sessions.
It gave us valuable feedback when it came to mechanics that are vital to hit the target aesthetic.

But we did run into on issue during the alpha test were our survey was one of the longest ones with questions added just for the sake of having more questions. This was however something we noticed and made sure to keep in mind for the beta, and only picking the questions that we actually wanted answers to.

Thanks for reading!

About Vidar Grönros

2017 Project Management

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