#assignment3playtesting

First of all I am so stoked on how the game looks and plays. For a game scraped together remotely in two weeks I think it's great. The guys did a great job with the programming and scaling the assets but there are still some difficulty issues with it. I botched the Kraken design as suspected so I will have to make a design that is easier to designate hitboxes to. The two people that played it had almost the exact same feedback which is great because it gives us a clear list of thinks to refine in time for the final playtest and submission. The main problems with the game in it's current state were:

-The alien is too fast. Players don't get enough time to respond. -The controls are not clear. We need to add a tutorial screen. -The enemy ship colour is green, that makes the players think that it is an ally not an enemy. -The enemies populate too quickly -The players had no idea how they gained score (should put that in the tutorial screen) -The objectives are unclear. -Players had no idea where the health bar was. -Players wanted more levels.

Positive takeaways -Players loved the art. -Players liked the controlled ricocheting bullet mechanic. -Players liked the theme. -Players liked the fact that it was fast paced and stressed you out a little bit but that once you worked out what was going on you could get quite good at it.

Today we performed our first play testing interview. We have only been working on the project for about a week so it wasnt completely finished yet so I was skeptical about performing it but I’m glad we did, because the early feedback we got was crucial in the roadmap for how we continued building our project. Some major comments that our playtester made were :  “ I think the gems should have something that makes them standout, a glow or something that makes them more tempting.” “ Change the power generator to a different sprite, I thought it was a bomb that was going to explode on me. “ These comments made us realise we had to do some work on our sprites, there would need to be a redesigning of them to make the game easier to understand. We also were able to identify some player habits that were causing play behaviour which we did not want. We noticed that the player was not moving around, instead standing still in the middle of the screen and shooting all the asteroids at will while the screen filled up with gems. He proceeded to do this until there gems everywhere then went around and collected them all at once. This made the game very easy and had little to no challenge to it. It completely removed the mechanic of flying around, avoiding collisions with asteroids. I thought back to the lecture earlier this year about balancing. In which we were told that the solution wasn’t always to be direct, but instead identify what the real problem is thats causing this and change that.