Playtesting
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This blogpost is about the playtesting and how it affected our development. We had three playtesting sessions during this course. The playtests were very useful, and it was so good that we had the opportunity to test other games and to have our game tested. We got some really good feedback from our fellow students, and it was nice to see what the other teams were doing and how they solved some of their problems. It was also really interesting to see the progress of their game making, how it evolved from a playable to a full beta. The feedback given during the playtests were taken very seriously, and we made many changes based on these. It was good to have someone else play the game and to have a different input. We in the group are watching and playing the game everyday so it is good with an outside opinion in case we get “homeblind”. It was also a very good deadline to have. We wanted a certain amount of assets to be functioning in the game in time for every playtest, and we managed to have most of what we wanted in the game at all the playtests. Much of that was thanks to our amazing programmer who worked his ass of before every playtest to meet the demands of the rest of the group. After the playtests we sat down in the group and discussed the feedback we got from our fellow students. We talked about what the most important features to change was and why, and which ones we had time to fix before the next deadline. It was usually a group decision, but in programming matters the programmer had the last say, and in graphics matters we graphics had the last say, because we each know what time it would take to make the changes. One of the changes made to the graphics was the power up crates, which I have already mentioned. The playtesters thought it was hard to tell what the crates was and that they were supposed to pick them up. Another change we made based on the feedback was to the boats movement. It was not “boaty” enough. That was a challenge for us, mostly programmer and designer. How do we make the movement more “boaty”?  |
