08-03-2018

Welcome back readers to a new week and of course a new post!
This week is supposed to be about playtesting and feedback but since I talked about that last week I’ll just skim it over quickly and then talk about something else.
If I would look back to all the feedback I’ve gotten during playtesting there are two main reasons to why I think it’s something very important during game-making. Firstly, you will never ever find all the bugs yourself! No […]

Comment Week 4

Greetings Hanna,
(William Teurnell, Team Poltergeist)
I enjoy the effects you are reaching for. You go into good detail on your thoughts and processes, and your decisions are clearly motivated. You explain the impact and intended meaning of your visuals, and you let the reader know of its significance. It was interesting how you recognised and worked around the fact that there was no animation by creating a sprite that appears caught-in-motion. I liked the end result for this reason; it looks […]

Comment week 3

Hello,
(William Teurnell, Team Poltergeist)
I enjoyed your post. It is systematic and comprehensible in an easy-to-follow way. You lead the reader into the text well by having a form of short introduction; your main point is summed up early. The same goes for the ending, where you sum up the points that you’ve made. I do, however, notice certain lacks of clarity at places. The fourth paragraph, regarding Trello, is somewhat unclear to me. I did not understand at first that […]

Comment week 2

(William Teurnell, Group Poltergeist)
You describe in good detail how you went about learning a new field. You briefly touch upon problems you have encountered, though you are quite vague in their description; you mention that most problems were small-scale, and then give an example of a technical issue you had (adding samples to LMMS). You don’t, however, mention any other problems, even though you imply that you had more. Perhaps you could go into greater detail into what different kinds […]

What improvments brought from playtesting

So far, we have done two times playtesting. Our team prepared different questions for both playtesting.
The first playtesting was primarily for us to find out what we might not have thought of. I can’t list all the questions here, so I chose two that I think are the most helpful for our game:
· What was your least favorite moment or interaction?
· Was there anything you wanted to do that the game didn’t allow you to do?
We got a lot of feedback […]

Question 2: Are you making Umibōzu?

So, the playtesting. It sure did happen.
I had a hard time with it in many ways. A lot of it I felt was not very useful. Largely because I was already aware of many of the criticisms to be had. The timing of the shield; the lack of variation in the enemies and their functions; poor communication with player, especially with feedback; the companion characters in the game not having enough utility, differentiation, or personality for the player to care […]

Blog 5

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Commenting on “Simple AI” by Natasha Megan

Link to the original post: https://programminggamesafunworkload.wordpress.com/2018/03/01/simple-ai/
The blog post is about the AI of the game “Friendship down” and describes the original design of the AI and how her group made it work for them. She gives great reasoning on why they had to abandon the original design of the AI and then goes into detail on how she implemented the simplified AI. Even though the AI was “simplified” to fit the scope of the project it is still […]

The Effects of Playtesting

Hi there people, playtesting is a great tool for improving the development process when making a game and I am here to tell you why.
Playtesting has bee very important for me and my group during the course of this project as it has given us invaluable information that can only be gathered through this kind of testing, namely the opinions of the end-users. As a part of the playtest we incorporated a survey for the players to fill out, rating […]

Play Testing

We got the chance to have our game play tested twice by our colleagues, once during the alpha phase of production and again during the beta phase, and during these play tests we had a survey for our testers to fill out where we asked them about the different aspects in our game like the different mechanics and controls, as well as the overall feel of the game.
Alpha play test:
During the alpha play test, we had our testers try out […]

Making one’s great ideas actually noticeable

As the name suggests, the core aesthetic of Friendship Down is friendship and comradery. In pursuit of this goal, the game was designed around a specific core mechanic: the player is given an activated ability that produces a shield with which the player can ward off enemy projectiles, potentially protecting both themselves and the Friends (allied NPCs that fight alongside the player. Within the context of the game these are referred to as the Friends). From this core design choice, […]

How has Playtesting effected my game’s development?

Hi, today I will be discussing why playtesting is an important aspect of game development and how playtesting has affected my game. Playtesting is the stage where a game developer tests a game for bugs and any design mishaps before releasing it to the public. Playtests can be run “open”, “closed”, “beta”, or otherwise. Open… Continue reading How has Playtesting effected my game’s development?