On Monday the 27th if February, 2017, we are provided a second chance for other game design students to try our game and give feedback. The last play-testing session was not prepared accordingly and this time I wish to improve. We did however gather a lot of valuable and constructive feedback which the group tried to remedy. I wish to gather data from the play-testing on how we succeeded in that and on possible new flaws.
The first thing that was lacking on our first session was an actual survey. We were unsure on specific to ask on a pre-alpha game so we simply took notes and provided testers with a sheet to write feedback on. Feedback was received for sure, but we did not have any tangible results to measure. It made reacting and correcting the flaws just a bit too difficult. Another obvious failed that occurred was the fact that we were missing a death screen; upon death after death the game had to be restarted. Luckily, that was fixed the day after.
As a format for the survey I chose Google Docs as that seemed to work as intended for most of the other groups. It would also be useful to have an online medium for it as then it can be accessed on any computer. The results would be easily accessed as well.
Our feedback surrounded the purpose of the game, common gameplay and player feedback. For example, we had no recoil when firing our main weapon. When creating the survey I wanted to ask those questions directly, i.e:
I make music for the game. Last time I relied on the volume output of my laptop’s speakers. Mistake. This time I will bring my own sound isolating headphones to make the testers experience the different elements of sound in the game. Also, we used a basic wired mouse for the testing. This time I will bring something more suitable and game oriented.
I watched some videos on collecting good feedback for the game. My main source was a sheet of link’s provided by our course director. The most direct was the one on top of the list by the Youtube channel “Extra Credits”. Emphasis was on providing testers with an experience to bring up discussion and feedback. I want to know how the player, not me, experiences the game in order to improve the experience for the player.
Tomorrow our game designer will do a quality check on our survey and it will then be put to use on Monday. I will update on how that goes.
P.S. I obviously had to add something “funny” to it:
Mikael the Finn - Quetzalcoatl 
Hello Mikael!
This post is very clear on what has been done and why and I think what you did this week is what many of us project managers did. I too had the same problem you had with not preparing well enough for the first playtesting session, this time it worked out a lot better though. Sounds like it did for you too! So what we can learn from this is obviously to prepare better. You can never be too prepared for anything basically, but sometimes you think it will be fine anyway. At least I do, but I have learned during our time in this education that I have to prepare a lot more than I usually do. It will be interesting to see how the playtesting works out in our next course when, I assume, we have to organize it ourselves.
Best of luck with the beta presentation next week!
Oskar Nolstedt
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