Dev Blog 5, Playtesting

This week I will be writing about how playtesting of our game has affected our development.
Coming in to the first session, our game wasn’t in a very playable state. Several mechanics were unclear and some of them weren’t completely implemented. This meant that testers had a hard time seeing what we were trying to accomplish with the design, and a lot of feedback was therefore useless. However, there were some useful takeaways for me.
The first takeaway was that we needed […]

Playtesting in our game

My own playtesting
First off, I wanna talk about the playtesting I do on my own while programming. Unity gives some good tools and functionality when testing, mainly the console(for debugging) and the ability to adjust variables while running the game in the inspector. This makes it way easier to balance certain features, and also just compare the game feel with different values for variables, like for movement.
This is somewhere I hope to improve though, to use the tools unity provides, […]

Is it boaty enough?

Testing is the backbone of any iterative project. Without testing, the product won’t improve. That’s why, in our project, there has been two major testing occasions where other students are supposed to test our game; one for the alpha and one for the beta release. In addition to the main test events, we are continuously testing within the group. I’ve also had the opportunity to let friends outside of campus test the game.
The player’s perspective
Some of the tutorial hints from the […]

Playtesting

Since the start of this project, we have had two opportunities to let teachers and other students playtest our game. These two sessions have had an immense positive effect on the development of our game.
Even if we playtested the game several times ahead, checked for bugs, searched for errors and wrongs, we were still too blind to see all the glitches that needed to be fixed. Working on the same game for weeks, makes it eventually difficult to spot […]

Playtesting

Having our game played by other students has been a great opportunity for us to receive a lot of constructive feedback, which was taken into consideration and later analyzed in order to make the right adjustments to the game mechanics in accordance with the advice we received following the playtesting session. Being one of the developers of a video game means that you often get the opportunity to playtest it in the hopes of finding bugs or other strange behaviors […]

Blog #5: How playtesting shaped one of our core mechanics

Hello and welcome again to my blog!
I am Léo and Scrum Master of Team Wendigo. Today, I will talk about playtesting and how it has affected the development of our game, “Umibōzu”. Playtesting is a crucial part of game development. Whether a mechanic is “fun” in a game is often discovered through the iterative and incremental nature provided by the Scrum framework (check out my blog post on Scrum). The Empiricism principle (“inspect and adapt”) as well […]

Playtesting

For our shoot ‘em up game we have had different play testing where we have shown our game for the other students and had them play it and come with feedback to help improve and see what flaws we have missed in the process of making the game.
It starts with we make the player play through the game, just explaining the controls and keep it very simple so the player can figure out without any instructions. After they have played […]

Testing, Testing, One…Two…Seven!? Oh No, Not Again!

The importance of a fresh pair of eyes on a work in progress during game development cannot be understated. Work on a game long enough, and the obvious problems start to become not so obvious. There have been two official playtesting sessions over the course of…the course, one before alpha and one before beta. While my group’s first playtesting session did not yield much as there was not much to test, the second playtesting session offered valuable insight into our […]

Beta Play Test

When producing a game it is very important to play test often. It gives you lots of insight and details on what to change, what is fun, what people like or do not like, almost everything! The more you do it, the more you know about your game. And what’s even better is to get someone else to play it too, other people have a fresh mind set which you can use to see flaws or details form someone who […]

Being prepared

As this is my second blog post on the topic of play testing, I will rather focus on preparing for playtesting, than the value of playtesting itself. If you want to read about that instead, check out this post. When working on a game it is very important to be prepared for things as Alpha and Beta presentations, but also for events like playtesting sessions.
This was unfortunately not the case when we had our […]

Playtesting

Hello reader 
This week I am writing about how the playtesting has affected our development of the game. 
Up to this point we have had two playtesting sessions that both have gone well. We had a good number of testers both times with a few more during the first session. Most of the feedback that we have received have been useful and some of it was a bit unclear. 
During the first playtesting we wanted to see what people generally thought of the game and what they thought of the things we had implemented at that time in the […]

5SD064 – Game Design Blog 08/03

The effects of Playtesting
Hello yet again! This week I will be writing about the effects that the sessions of playtesting had on our game, Beelonging.
During the course we had the opportunity to let other developers from the other teams, as well as the professors at the university, play and try out our game. There were two sessions, Alpha playtesting and Beta playtesting.
The point of playtesting is to let players who have no previous experience of the game play it and […]