While my game wasn’t as far along with development as I wanted, I did manage to get a few people to playtest my game and took their comments on board. I approached three people, each of whom had different experience with games. I have listed their quotes below along with my responses to the responses I received.
‘It’s okay. But a little dull, some sound effects would be nice and some more variety in enemies would be nice.’
Deacon Grey – My First Play tester – Avid gamer
Deacon is a friend of my brothers. I chose him as he doesn’t know me and therefore would give honest feedback. He is also someone who plays games in his free time, which gives a different perspective to the other play testers.
When I had the game, play tested I had not yet implemented the four different enemy sprites, so I was not surprised when I two of my play testers commented on the lack of variety shown. In response to the desire for sound effects I added a background song which I hope makes the game more appealing to the player. I did try to add explosion sound effects to the player and enemies upon destruction however I couldn’t find a way to get this to work. The issue I had with this was adding a sound effect to an object is fine, but to try and get that sound effect to trigger upon that object’s destruction doesn’t work because in destroying that object in turn destroys the sound effect.
I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do, and nothing happens when the enemy got to me.
— Jaqueline Beaton – My Second Play tester – Not a gamer
I chose Jaqueline because she doesn’t play video games and so I thought would give a different perspective from the others. When she played the game, I hadn’t yet added the code that destroys the player upon collision with the enemy, and so fixing this issue just came with time. I debated what to do about giving the player a purpose for a while, I had originally planned to add cut scenes however I do not know how to do this and didn’t have time to try and figure it out. I ended up adding a score count to the top left corner of the screen, which should hopefully appeal to the players competitiveness.
There doesn’t seem to be much to do, and killing one slowly moving enemy over and over quickly gets dull.
Franklin Miah – My Third Play Tester – Occasional gamer
Franklin plays games every now and then but describes himself as ‘a casual gamer at best’. I thought he would be good to have as a play tester to show the opinion of the middle ground between my first two testers. When he played the game, I only had one enemy working and so I am hoping that the addition of different enemies with different speeds helps to make the game a bit more frantic. I did also think I could perhaps allow the player to place turrets down, thus tying the game back to my original plan for a top-down shooter, however I simply don’t know how to do this and didn’t have time to learn.