Week 4: Playtesting

Hey there folks, we conducted a SHIT ton of playtesting these past two weeks and discovered some interesting things about the game and ourselves. First and foremost, we learned that one of our programmers sucks mad fish eggs and is no match for peeps who are actually good at fighting games. Past that nuisance of him being a dork, we found a few interesting splits between how people viewed the game. For the art style, many players loved the simplicity and the simple toon shader but some really hated the keyframe animation style we went for. From this we can infer that we need a solid wrapper or theme to justify the keyframe animation style as well as an overarching theme to pull all the elements together. Which would in turn help point us in the right direction on how to increase visual feedback. Peeps also wanted the fish to be textured. Again highlighting the need for visual feedback, many testers reported either adding more particle effects or camera effects to give more umph for attacks connecting.


Past the visuals, gameplay wise we were met with a few interesting discussions. To start a few bugs were found by a few, literally two strong bois, playtesters. The bugs revealing edge cases we had not considered. The first is the case of if both players attack on the same frame, it would favor the right fish (blue fish). The second case was extremely specific in that the hitboxes of the fish just barely touched after an attack connected and with the correct timing a hit player could retaliate. While the second one sounds like a feature it really isn’t one. To our current knowledge we have patched these bugs. Now past the bug report testers reported on a few things they felt were needed. The most reported thing was a win screen or a death animation, or a combination of the both just to have a finished loop in place. On top of that the second most suggested thing was more dynamic gameplay, as in have a third move for both buttons pressed. 


The To Do’s we got from this playtest session are:
  • Hunt the testers who found the bugs, have them retest to see if we truly patched
  • Out source and crowd source for ideas of a theme / wrapper
  • Crowdsource ideas for what the third move should be (counter? Power move? CHarche attack? etc.)
  • Prototype the third move
  • Implement the death animation and end screens (player 1 or 2 wins)
  • Improve visual feedback (dependant on theme choice)
  • Find the second fish (fish controller)
  • After a theme/wrapper is decided upon start arting it up to fit said theme/wrapper
  • Out source for more sound / music ( we got ourselves an music boi)
  • Consider overhauling the code to accept custom keybindings 

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