Week 6 - Testing

Week 6 - Testing 

This week was my final / main testing session of my game before it needed to be completed! I learnt a lot about how others play my game, and received lots of amazing feedback not just through the feedback form, but also through comments made, and also by observing multiple especially new players of my game who had not tested it in previous weeks was extremely insightful. 

Through all of these means I was able to implement a few things to really polish of my game, and enhance the gaming experience. Some of the feedback I collected was: 

• Add a full screen option
• Menu button hit box too small
• Player hit box too big, getting stuck on obstacles
•  Objectives unclear
• Confused on where to go
• The art style is adorable. The game play is spot on
• The characters where peak and really added a lot.
• Combat music was a little jarring, maybe a cross-fade would be nice?
• Nice seeing proper character art in-game instead of just sprites. Also, dynamic combat music is always a win.
• The main character size might be slightly to big for the size of the world (scaling is a smidge off)
• Controls easy to learn and suit the game play
• Footstep audio bug, when dying in walking animation footstep sound continues playing on the menu screen. 

With this huge amount of feedback I worked on fixing a few things in my game! 

Footstep bug: 

The first thing I worked on was fixing the bug that was found about the footstep audio. To fix this I added in a private bool to the player movement script that checks if the player is alive or dead, and made sure it stopped both movement and footstep audio when the player dies. Now, as soon as the death is triggered, the game properly cuts off footsteps and animations!

Unclear Objectives: 

I noticed this both while observing others, and also received feedback that sometimes the players were confused on where to go and what the game was asking them to do. I noticed while watching others play that they quite often walked past NPCs, as they were often slightly too far out of the players camera view, which then intern left players wandering  around unsure where to go as I had it set up that through NPC dialogue that instructs the player where to go. 

To fix this I positioned the NPCs in more clear spots in the game, as well as adjusted some dialogue to make instructions more clear to the player! 

Player Scale/Collider + Menu button fixes: 

I got feedback a few times that the player collisions were sometimes unclear due to the collider on the player being too big, as well as that the scaling felt slightly off. To fix this I made the box collider on the player smaller, mostly around the players feet, but still big enough to have enemies hit it easily. As well as made the scaling slightly smaller! 

The menu buttons was also an easy fix, as I had just forgotten to scale up the button size itself when I made the text bigger, I just went around every UI button in my game and made sure this was updated properly. This made the menu a lot smoother feeling, and meant that the player could hover the cursor over any part of the text and be able to click the buttons! 

This was the main feedback I was able to implement in the time before this game was due, something I agreed with and wanted to fix was the transition of background to battle music being jarring, but was something I was not able to work out how to do in time. If I continue working on this game in the future, this would be something I would love to add! 

Overall I really enjoyed the experience of having my game being tested every week and really loved the final playtest that was done on a bigger scale. Quite often people would pick up on small bugs I had missed, as well as gave me good new ideas I could implement. It really helped my game develop over the few weeks we had and I am grateful that I was able to get such feedback so often as it helped develop my skills!