As you might have guessed from the (totally original and almost certainly never used before) wordplay in the title – this week we did some play testing of our game.
Last week we’d had a pretty rocky play test with our class. What we learned from that was that our game was a long way off being properly ready to test. Movement was janky, levels hadn’t really been tested, and a lot of the ‘juice’ was missing.
To add to the problems. we didn’t really manage to set up very well, or run through our game properly before getting anyone to sit down and play. As a result, sound wasn’t set up properly, there were a number of bugs that we didn’t know about, and basic things like controls were different to what we had expected.
So that went about as well as we expected.
Following that, the rest of the week was a pretty hard slog by a few of us, to get into a position that we were actually happy to show to our peers.
Credit to two of our programmers, who put in a huge effort to implement an entire new movement system, and sort out a whole bunch of bugs, and our level designer, who built three serviceable levels without being able to play through them.
The reason for all this extra effort was the planned play test for Tuesday of this week. We held a play test session at The Arcade (http://thearcade.melbourne/) – a collaborative workspace for indie game developers, and invited the resident developers to check out our game and give feedback.
I took some time off work to go into the Arcade early and run some levels before the play test. There were a few little changes to make to get everything in order, and I wanted to make sure we had our sounds and controls set up properly. (I then promptly changed computers without pushing my changes to the repo and lost them all, but you can’t win them all…).
Anyway – in the end it all went pretty well! we had three levels that could be played through from start to finish, and nothing was stupidly broken. A real improvement over the previous week.
We got some really useful feedback from the developers who played through the game, and they all seemed to not hate it, which is good, right?
Since then, we’ve been going through the feedback received, and getting everything ready for our final submission on Friday.
We had a team meeting on Wednesday and talked over everything. There had been some negativity following the previous test, so we took some time to highlight some wins that we had, just to make sure that we acknowledge good work and keep people feeling positive.
I think we are in a position to submit a reasonable alpha version of FourShadow at the end of next week. I don’t know that I think it is the greatest game ever created, but I do think we have some interesting mechanics that we can turn into an interesting game with a bit more effort.
As Andy (our tutor) said this week: Semester one – make the game. Semester two – make it good.
Bring on semester two…