Space Recruitment Playtesting
We tested the game with five naïve users, who continued to do a deep playtest. All the users that were chosen, were from our wide demographic in that they enjoyed real-time strategy games, first person shooters and variety of other genres. Two of the users can be considered to be a part of our core demographic, who enjoy the arcade shooter genre, while the rest did not hate or enjoy the genre. All the users that play tested this game primary used mouse and keyboard normally when it came to the main games, thus all users have had extensive experience with the use of mouse and keyboard.
Fortunately, due to majority of the user being experienced with shooters, they were able to enjoy the arcade shooter game to a certain degree and provide feedback accurately addressing the issue the game had. The users who liked role-playing and action-adventure games suggested interesting potential features to be added into the game.
Throughout the play test we were able to gather very valuable feedback and after compiling all of it. It honestly opened our eyes to so many features and elements of the game that even experienced players within the genre of arcade shooters still found some features frustrating and hard to distinguish without an ample walkthrough.
Although the prototype we had the play testers use for feedback wasn’t very refined, we still were able to get some very valuable feedback which we will be able to use to further improve the gameplay loop in future iterations of the game Space Recruitment.
A few crucial aspects highlighted by almost of the players that we play tested was the need to change how the asteroids spawned and along with the teleporting mechanic from when the player hits the edge boundary of the map, they will get teleported to the other side of the map. These two criticisms were echo by almost all the play testers and will be the most important thing to address in the following versions of the game as players found these two mechanics to be the most frustrating elements of the game. This was further amplified due to there being no marking or border being shown at the edge of the map leading disorientating teleports.
Most of the players suggested that changes to the assets will be necessary to address issues such as differentiating between different asteroid types depicting if they should be destroyed for scoring points or interacted with to gain benefits such as more ships and lives. Besides assets changes, there are major problems due to the lack of instructions being provided to the player. The win condition of the game is not clearly defined, the usage and penalty of the asteroids with stranded ships. Players were also having issues of the notification that lives were being lost due to the usage of text and the constant clutter of many asteroids the user had to deal with.
There were some issues regarding the balance of the different weapon type pickups, where the full auto fast firing weapon would be considered over powered and break the game balance in comparison to using the inferior shotgun or spread shot powerup that was reviewed as being either too slow or seen as a negative to due to the causality that could be caused to the stranded ships to be rescued.
Increasing difficulty and progression mechanics were also echoed by some of the play testers as an infinite scoring session without motivating features did not encourage much variety to the playthroughs conducted.
Finally, there are some minor issues regarding some of the designs of the game. The hitboxes of the asteroids were not configured properly and should be solved easily with minimal effort and the design concept for the player interaction with the asteroids containing recruitable stranded ships, needed to be reworked. Players often found themselves unintentionally destroying the asteroid with the ship due to the momentum of shooting while turning to move towards recruiting the ship.
Positively, the responses to the difficulty of the game resulted in what was we had expected and set during the initial design process. Additionally, it is fortunate that all the playtesters had fun.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdTUOYBljPNf284QiXFniKvDNjCAHfN7Nbbf0AGgGJ07WXlIA/viewform?usp=sf_link
Prototype: https://games.gdevelop-app.com/game-caa44c83-d404-463a-915a-645745b5e2cb/index.html