It’s always important that the players understand your game. To make sure of that, and to receive feedback and critique to improve your game, it’s good to have several playtesting sessions. When you are developing a game it’s often easy to become “blind” and not notice things that are unclear or don’t make sense in the game. We’ve had two playtesting sessions during the development of the shoot em up game, Alpha and Beta.
So, how did the playtesting affect my development?
We received some really valuable and good feedback from our playtesters after the alpha and beta playtest. As an artist of the team, I focused on the feedback regarding the graphics. For me it was important to know what the playtesters thought the graphics was communicating. I wanted to know what they thought about the colors, the sizes, the shapes etc. Some of the feedback we received were:
– Enemies are too cute, not enough evil looking
– Are the bees good or evil? (They are shooting innocent flies??)
– The foreground is hiding the avatar and the enemies too much
– The dragonfly is hard to distinguish from the background
– It’s hard to distinguish the characters from the background
– The losing screen is cute, but did I win or lose? (Screen showing a happy bear eating honey)
Taking this to mind, these are a few of the changes I made for the game:
The dragonfly
The first intension was to make the dragonfly turquoise and look dumb, but I needed to make it look more mean so it would distinguish from the bee. I also changed the color to make the dragonfly stand out more from the green-ish background.
The foreground
The foreground in the Beta (which still was a placeholder) hid the player and enemies a lot during the gameplay, which many of the playtesters found annoying. After the playtest, I removed/reduced the stones, added holes in the vegetations and also placed everything lower, taking up less space of the screen.
The bees
The color of the bees went from black and yellow to brown and yellow to make it appear less dangerous and make it differ from the wasp. I also made the eyes a little bigger, closer together to make the bee look cuter.
Before the playtesting, I was already aware of some of the graphical problems that the playtesters later mentioned, but I think it’s good to have it confirmed by others. Sometimes you as a developer might notice something that the playtesters may not notice or even think of as a problem for the game, which is also good to know.
As mentioned earlier, it’s very useful to have playtests since other people can see mistakes and errors that you haven’t noticed. Another playtest session would have been preferable to improve our game further, but since we are running out of time major changes would have been impossible to make.
Only one week left until final! Iih!
/ Petra, artist of team Lycanthrope
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