Second Playtest
This Tuesday, we went to Colonial Campus and brought our first playable version game to do play test with the students. We asked for two different group of students to help us to test the game play as well as our art choice and style.
First, we learned the lesson from the last playtest and prepared another survey form which is more specific and less bias. For example we list different version of UI elements and ask them to circle which make sense for them. Then, we let the students to try our playable demo, and observe their behaviors during their playing it. Then we did brief interview with the students to get know their opinions and suggestions.
However, since we didn’t make it clear to the teacher, the first group we did playtest with is from different “social class groups”, which means that they are not familiar with each other and we find out it is still very hard to force several students to speak out even the game mechanism encourage them to communication. The second group is who we did our first playtest with and the atmosphere is better. We decide to include this group into our all following playtest to help us track our development.
Here’s several feedback on from the students:
- Game play
- It’s fun to play, even currently a lot of visual element is just placeholders
- The defender’s basic skill can be different from the striker’s, we can swipe or build an energy shield to defend from the attack
- The engineer producing crystals takes to long, should be shorten
- We should make a leader board which can reward their achievement and also help the teacher to track different groups’ performance.
- Art Style
- The UI is clear but current lack of feedback which make the user experience not as we expected
- The students can recognize the spaceships facing directions
Work Progress
Programming:Finished basic game play programming.Working on rewrite the lobby system to enable each player to reconnect to the server. Also start to implement the UI feedback and more detailed features.
Art: Finish all players and lobby user interfaces and start to design the big screen UI. Start to design the attack/eliminate enemy effect, start to design the enemy spaceship.
And we start to prepare for the halves which will happen next week. (Finished the presentation slides).