Week 4 Platformer Playtesting
In the lecture we learnt how vital it is to have moment to moment gameplay as players will lose interest in the game quite quickly. This was further reflected while playtesting my game, the game only consisted of a few platforms and slimes. It did however have coins you could collect but the coding behind the score wasn't quite right so you could only collect them.
This week in gdevelop I learnt how to add checkpoints or finishing lines. This was a feature in my platformer where if the player reached the end without dying they were able to move onto the next level. How I did this was I made it so if the player object collided with my newly added finish line object, the scene would then be changed to a different one. However, one of the interesting things that I learnt was that you have to recreate all of the objects and behaviour for the objects as none of them transfer over.
While conducting the post playtesting interviews I figured out that I was unable to ask certain questions this week such as "did you enjoy playing the game?" or "What did you like about the game". This was due to the fact that I knew my game didn't have enough 'filler' and that it only took my players 30 seconds to get to the end. Instead I was asking questions like "whats a feature that you would like to be added to the game?" and "Whats something that you would do differently?". One of the key insights I got from playesting was that the players were more invested into the game when they could see the checkpoint/finish line. Something else that I learnt was originally the players were annoyed that they had to keep closing the game once they had died because the code for the player object didn't work. However, this was changed due to my first participant showing me how to get the player object to respawn at the start, which led to the second playtesting participant having a more enjoyable play. Overall, I was happy with the amount of work I put into the platform and the feedback I got as well from my playtesting participants.