Week 5 - Our First Playtests
We're back at it again. We combined our code to whip up a very rough prototype for the game this week. We intended to test our core body-swapping mechanic to gauge how it feels and how to expand on it, as well as some early implementations for room transitions and enemy AI. We ended up biting off a little more than we could chew and managed to create a prototype testing only the player movement, body-swapping once, and some basic platforming. However, this ended up providing some valuable insights based on our playtests.
We tested 4 players, each with a plethora of gaming experience, and 2 of which were developers themselves. Testing experienced players in this early, rough phase of game decelopment proved useful, as they were able to imagine a better picture of what the final version of the game might look like. New or inexperienced players might get lost more easily and get bogged down with the bugs and rough edges to provide any insightful feedback.
We found that we severely underestimated the importance of "game feel" since our game is 2D platoformer. Games that inspired ours like Hollow Knight, Celeste, and Ori and the Blind Forest, all have subtle intricacies to their movement and jumping that subconsciously make the game super fun to play. We lacked these intricacies and that came to light during our playtesting. Things like jump buffering, smaller player hitboxes, and tall ceilings were missing from our experience, making the basic platforming not that fun. If the basic movement isn't fun in an empty room, the rest of the game will suffer.
Moving foward, we plan on focusing in on refining and polishing our basic movement. We want to add all the intricacies other games have to have a solid foundation to build the rest of the game off of.
Also we made some more art stuff.
We tested 4 players, each with a plethora of gaming experience, and 2 of which were developers themselves. Testing experienced players in this early, rough phase of game decelopment proved useful, as they were able to imagine a better picture of what the final version of the game might look like. New or inexperienced players might get lost more easily and get bogged down with the bugs and rough edges to provide any insightful feedback.
We found that we severely underestimated the importance of "game feel" since our game is 2D platoformer. Games that inspired ours like Hollow Knight, Celeste, and Ori and the Blind Forest, all have subtle intricacies to their movement and jumping that subconsciously make the game super fun to play. We lacked these intricacies and that came to light during our playtesting. Things like jump buffering, smaller player hitboxes, and tall ceilings were missing from our experience, making the basic platforming not that fun. If the basic movement isn't fun in an empty room, the rest of the game will suffer.
Moving foward, we plan on focusing in on refining and polishing our basic movement. We want to add all the intricacies other games have to have a solid foundation to build the rest of the game off of.
Also we made some more art stuff.
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