Upcoming Changes – Results of the playtesting

As we’re closing in on the beta stage of production, a small playtesting session was held, to receive feedback from one another as well as get a feeling of what stage every group is at.

For this session, we had three computers running the game, and two computers where people could fill out feedback in a questionnaire, hosted on Google Docs. Despite this, it tended to clog up, either at the game computers, or at the feedback computers, which meant that everyone that wanted to test perhaps couldn’t, the to all seats being filled.

During the (roughly) 2 hour period, we received 20 answered questionnaires, and some additional feedback vocally. Straight afterwards, we had a meeting where we discussed the results and what we could change in the game based on them.

The three pieces of feedback we got to hear the most were:

There’s nothing to do when running back from bosses

To help with this, we’re adding eggs to various places on the map. When shot, the eggs burst, revealing 4 small flies. These flies follow you around until you stop, at which point they start aimlessly flying around you. These flies have no other purpose in the game. To prevent performance issues, we limited the number of flies active at any one point to 100. Sorry to those of you that wanted to create a massive fly army.

Dying is very confusing, since it puts you back at the start

This is actually a piece of feedback that conflicted with our original intent. When we originally made the game, we specifically decided to put you back at the start of the game, and you could use some of the hidden paths to quicker get back to where you were. Turns out that most people didn’t find these hidden paths, or they didn’t realize they were meant as shortcuts. So, we put in checkpoints at various points in the game. These checkpoints are activated by stepping on them, and serve as your new spawn point until you activate a new checkpoint.

The hidden paths are still in the game though, so if you know where they are, you can still use them.

I can’t tell when I’m taking damage!

This one is entirely a priority miss. We were so eager to get “new” things in, that we basically just forgot to implement some kind of feedback when the player takes damage. While I don’t have any fancy picture for this (since it still isn’t implemented), we will have some kind of feedback, most likely some mild blinking and brief invulnerability.

All in all, we (or at least I) am quite happy with the feedback we got. While we sadly can’t please everyone, we’ll do our best to please as many as possible, while still staying true to ourselves and our design.