Blog #5 Playtesting
|
In this blog post I will cover my experiences with both playtesting sessions of Into the fog. Firstly, I am very grateful that we got an opportunity to conduct playtesting during the course, however I believe that making it mandatory isn’t the greatest idea. Because of it’s small size, my group has run into many obstacles during the early stages of development, most of which were code-related. Unfortunately we have arrived to the Alpha playtesting with the bare minimum amount features in place, and we were aware of every issue mentioned by the playtesters. Because of this, the entire playtest session turned out useless, as we could have spent that day creating more content rather then nodding continuously as we were given the very same feedback over and over again. Putting all that aside however, having your game tested by people outside the development team is a great opportunity to learn and gather important data, which will later help you improve your product. Gaining perspective is crucial as there is only so much you can foresee when playing your own creation. Every individual that gets a change to play your game has different experiences and a different approach to each respective genre, thus you are almost guaranteed to receive some constructive criticism, which is always greatly appreciated. After the first playtesting session, the group has decided reallocate some of the responsibilities among the team members, hoping that it would maximize our efficiency. It turned out to be a good move as the game has gone through some very drastic changes within the following few weeks and it was barely recognizable when people got a change to play it during the Beta playtest. This time around we were able ask playtesters much more valuable questions and as a result gather far more useful feedback. The data we have gather included feedback about the player movement, enemies, projectiles, power-ups, level design, UI and the fog feature. This playtesting session left us with a lot of great new ideas and solutions to issues that have been on our shoulders for quite a while, giving us an opportunity to tweak the game to improve the player experience, as well as learn a lot about different ways people choose to approach certain obstacles in video games. To conclude, even though first time around we didn’t have much to present, the playtesting overall has turned out very helpful not only for improving our game, but also for drawing conclusions from our design choices so that we can learn from our mistakes and use these new experiences in our future projects. Mateusz  |