Our playtest was a bad experience. 6 groups canceled on the day of the test. We only had two groups show up to play test our game. From the two playtests we found that both players were intrigued by the controller and enjoyed using it. Unfortunately, the controller and the code were not completely bug free, making a key aspect “combining” of our game more difficult than we wanted.
Some interesting things that we noted from the playtest:
1) need more scaffolding
- it was too hard to combine by level 3 because there were too many bullets flying around by then.
2) visually the islands didn’t blend into the background enough.
3) more visual cues to damage player and enemies are taking
4) player planes need more distinguishing characteristics
5) players want a score
6) powerup + combined is too powerful, the movement restrictions on combined form are not enough of a deterent to prolonged combined form.
7) even though the players had finished all the content they continued to play
not all players realized the end goal was to have two controllers.
Some things we had wished we had done better to get a better play test experience (besides fixing the bugs and such):
1) a better tutorial for the physical controller
2) better difficulty ramp level for the playtest levels
3) ended the playtest after the boss fight, since every level after the boss fight just repeated, it didn’t have a satisfactory ending
4) more of a fleshed out game play experience.
The big take aways:
We were happy that people seemed to enjoy the physical controller. The combine mechanic which is echoed by the controller was interesting to the players. These were two of the main things that we were hoping to confirm.