#play-test

For our play-test we used a tool google form to put both the questionnaire and survey in it, then ask the play-tester to do the first part before hand and the second part after hand.

During the first play-test, the player find our world, art and game play mostly enjoyable, and thinks that there are enough difficulties.

Some things that the player point out are for example, some times they through a gap is jump-able but turns out the hit-box is a bit bigger than expected and failed.

For the first two play-test, player thinks it is easy to play, so one aspect we might consider to is change back the algorithm to make it more hard to play, but then add more item to give player tools to fight against the increased boss chase, so that they have tension and fun at the same time.

One interesting finding in the time recording is that player actually take a bit more time to approach a new thing that they first saw, such as seeing the clock for a first time or seeing the slime for the first time took them 1 more second to interact with them. This might be cause they are thinking about the new things, and they also have this reaction when they touch the clock and afterward say," oh, so it stop the thing for a bit", new item might also be a fun part for the player, we can add more to it depending on the situation.

More add-ons after the whole process:

During the second playtest, in this playtest we have already renew our game from the first version, we added the item for the play to use. But during the playtest I figure that sometimes the icon of the item is not as obvious as I think, so player failed to understand what the item do, so they couldn't effectively use the item the way is should. On top of that, some player also thinks that the item hotkeys are hard to use, so other player thinks the item hotkey is friendly because it is close to the control key "WASD", one thing that I found about the item is that sometimes the situation of the gameplay is so quick and the player failed to press the item quick enough. Another finding in the playtest that is most important is that player thinks the control of the character is very slippery, and the character hitbox is weird and easy to fall off the platform while turning.

All of this and that problem we changed for the final prototype, we removed the sword from the character, the actual reason we found that the player find the character turning very weird and fall off platform, is that the sword of the character also counted in the hitbox, so when the player thinks the foot of the character is still on the platform, it is actually the starting point of the sword is the half-way point of the hitbox, causing confusion. So we decided to remove the sword.

(before and after)

Kickstarter Guide: The Wonderful World of Playtesting

Playtesting is critical if you want to publish your game, but it is one of the more difficult elements of games development. So how do you go about it?

Firstly, start with press ganging your friends and family into playing your game as many times and as regularly as possible, this will shake out a lot of the initial problems. Having a game with a solo mode is always helpful because you should…