Assignment 3 playtesting
Now that we had a working prototype of our game, it was time to get some user data. We had conducted a total of eight playtests. To do these playtests, our group member, Cane, made a pre-playtest survey, a general script, and a post-playtest survey.
These playtests consisted of a pre-play survey to understand how experienced the play tester was in gaming and what games they enjoy playing. Then we would conduct the silent playtest, where we would ask the play tester to communicate everything on their mind as they played through the game without us giving any hints. While the playtest was active, we would have two notetakers: one who would write down what the player was saying, and the other who would write at what times the player was encountering issues. We then got the player to do a deep playtest of the game in where we would explain how to go about certain aspects of the game and get them to re-try playing the game with the same note takers. After the two playtests were done, we got the play tester to fill out a response survey.
The playtests ended with varying results between the response and the difficulty that people found the game to be. For the majority, they found the game to be difficult yet enjoyable. The game did have a few notably frustrating aspects, one of which being the coin placement feeling unnatural or difficult compared to other games like Sonic or Mario. Although originally it was out intention to make the game difficult to collect every coin, some coins that we intended on making it easy to get were annoying to the players as they needed to jump to get a coin that was just above their head height. Another notable frustration players had were the goblins, as their walking pattern was inconsistent with the platform and their dash meant that if the players got hit by them when they were about to dash, they wouldn’t get a chance to pick up coins and got sent to the beginning with nothing. Even the more experienced players with platformers like ours got frustrated with the goblin’s movement patterns. Finally, players were also finding the traps to be frustrating as they blended in really well with the ground. Players would also forget that traps existed and stop looking for them, which caused most of our testers to get fairly annoyed. Overall, we got extremely valuable user data for our game prototype.
Fullerton, T. (2018). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. ProQuest Ebook. Retrieved from: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/reader.action?docID=5477698