First Week of Playtesting
First week of playtesting led to five playtesters - 4 of the playtests were found and done during the gamedev club’s testing session, with the last being conducted shortly after. There were a couple of issues with the playtesting build at the time, which we wanted to get fixed before testing but were unable to - unfortunately this meant cutting out the tutorial entirely as some minor errors made the player unable to progress, which probably contributed a lot to some of the confusion felt by the players
Insights
People generally enjoyed the game – There was overall positive feedback on the game and its potential
People liked the aesthetics of the environment- one of the things the playtesters all commented on
The game wasn’t very clear on directions and players were often lost and confused as to where to go or what they needed to do in each section
The maze area was extremely confusing to players and almost everyone who went in criticized this section of the map.
The less is more puzzle (pressure plates) was received well, with the players going through this section enjoying the puzzles after the game mechanics of the time shift clicked
The dojo / lever rush area caused a lot of confusion - people weren’t sure what the objective of this area was - they noticed the switches around the area but were unable to grasp why they existed other than a vague notion that they needed to be pulled
The characters were extremely hard to control, with the boy’s animation being extremely wonky
Lots of bugs everywhere such as getting stuck behind invisible walls, unexpected interactions with various objects, etc.
To Improve/Improved areas based on feedback
The maze area is getting revamped to improve clarity and game flow - hopefully no more backtracking after the player exits the maze and realizes they have to go back inside.
The tutorial area’s bugs are fixed, and the next build now includes the tutorial, so hopefully this fixes a lot of the confusion from the players
Additional dialogue to be placed around the area - hopefully improves the players sense of direction within the world and helps them from getting too lost
The dojo / lever rush area will be updated for increased clarity as to what the levers do, and the difficulty of the area may be decreased as players were already finding it hard to navigate the area to get to the harder switches, let alone doing it all quickly.
Additional invisible walls to be placed in many locations where it was too easy to fall off and cause the player to be stuck.
Fixing the player controller - many of the grievances caused by the last controller (sinking into the ground, too hard to walk up slopes) have already been fixed, but there are still some bugs that need to be ironed out (the player slides rapidly down slopes sometimes, jumping is wonky, etc.)
General Bugfixing - many miscellaneous items here (fox not interacting with objects properly, some objects missing colliders...)
Responses
The google forms data exported to google sheets -
And using the form, the start of a line graph for each of the responses -
Each week the responses for each survey question will be averaged and uploaded onto this spreadsheet so that we can view the progress over time for each of the responses.
For the sake of easier responses, we asked playtesters to score non-applicable items 1. This includes sections of the game unable to be accessed (i.e. the tutorial) as well as a few other miscellaneous things such as sound and music which were yet to be implemented. This might cause some rapid inflation in the growth when these things are fixed.