Team 5: Adam! - Playtesting report

Overview

For the past week we held a few playtesting sessions on a Xbox in the student lounge of the student associations VIS, AMIV and VMP, the perfect place to find some dedicated hardcore gamers. The playtesting sessions were a lot of fun and most enlightening. Here are a few of our findings.

What we heard from our testers

Where can I jump?? (and similar controls-related questions)

It seems like most of our testers were not familiar with our layout of the controls on the gamepad. Together with our group of testers we decided on a new layout which you can see here:

360_controller_help_black.png

I can't hit the boss (with the fireball)

Because of the perspective and the controller it was quite hard to hit the boss from a distance with a fireball. We added an auto-aiming feature that triggers as soon as Adam is facing the boss with a certain angle and after that we didn't hear any complaints anymore.

Where am I?

This question usually came up after a character died and respawned at a position the tester did not expect. We plan to add a visual clue as to where the respawn-point will be.

I want some indication as to how far this fireball will go.

We are not sure how to accomplish that point. Adding an arrow or a little ring on the ground which shows the point of impact seems to make the aiming too easy and will also clutter the screen with even more stuff that you have to be aware of. We like to think of it as a challenge that is part of our gameplay.

Jumping seems to lag...

One of our testers seemed to be irritated by a noticeable lag before the controlled character visibly jumps after pressing the jump button. We did not yet take any measures against this problem as we did not hear any complaints from other testers.

Make the fireballs bigger...

With four players simultaneously playing, individual fireballs are easy to miss compared to the size of the large explosions. Thus we are planning to increase their size after further evaluation.

What's this blue thing for?

After a few more hits, they figured out that it's a shield.

What we observed

Testers did not understand that they could temporarily destroy the shield by shooting at it continuously.

To make it more obvious, we made it quite a lot easier. Like that, the shield gets visibly smaller with every fireball but also restores pretty fast after being destroyed.

Testers did not understand the purpose of the ice-path.

It seems to be pretty hard to realize that you can walk over the ice-path and destroy the shield with a simple melee attack. We plan to show some hints in a loading screen as to where the weakness of the boss is.

Testers did not understand that Sandy's position can be controlled while she is underground.

Like with the ice-path, we need to add some kind of hints.

Testers did not work together and died.

That is what we want, but we think that making the weakness of the boss more obvious will motivate them to work together.

Sound-hints are useless with 3-4 players.

In the alpha version we use a sound effect to notify the player that the shield cannot be used currently. While this seems to work with 2 players, and maybe even with 3, there is just too much going on with 4 players. Therefore we need to focus more on visual clues (and force-feedback) like a little progress bar while reloading the shield.

The Xbox in the student lounge is terribly slow when our cute penguins show up.

It seems that not every Xbox is the same and the one we used for playtesting nearly ruined the testing experience. We did not find the reason for this just yet.

Attachments


Page URL: https://twiki.graphics.ethz.ch/bin/view/GameClass/2011Team5_Playtesting
2024-03-28
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