Our First Playtest: What We Learned

Hey all! This is Team Gamer with another blog post! This time, it’s about our first playtest. Let’s talk about what kind of feedback we got and what we learned from it.

The Survey

Here’s the survey! We used the EOTA method to ask for feedback:

• Experiences: “What was your experience like?”
• Observations: “What did you observe?”
• Thoughts: “How do you think your observations and experience are connected?”
• Advice: “Do you have any advice for us?”

We also went ahead and added a question to ask for any other statements in case there was any feedback that didn’t fit any of the above questions.

After making the survey, we went ahead and sent out the itch.io and the feedback form to friends, family, and some clubs. We received 3 replies! Let’s dive in.

“What was your experience like?”

We ask this question to hear about the gut reactions and the first impressions people have when they first play our games. It helps us figure out what catches the players’ attention first thing they play and what tone is set the rest of the game. From the feedback, they mostly noticed frame rate lag and a lack of information.

“What did you observe?”

We ask this question so that we can see what the player sees. The things they hear, the things they notice when they look close and think back. In this case, there weren’t any major bugs that broke the game. Our third response narrated a whole playthrough, which we appreciated!

“How do you think your observations and experience are connected?”

We ask this question to understand the player’s thinking a bit better, in context of the connections they make between reactions, feelings, observations, and experiences. Nothing really seemed to stand out, except for some confusion and perhaps boredom.

“Do you have any advice for us?”

We asked this question to try and get closer to the root of a problem, as well as possibly get some ideas for how to fix it. All of their suggestions are very useful here, and we’d implement them all if we were still working on the game.

“Is there anything else you’d like to add?”

We asked this question in lieu of asking for their theories on what the game was about. We weren’t exactly trying to tell a message with our game. This question lets us know any other thoughts they might have had, and usually steers us towards what was fun and what wasn’t. Their thoughts here aligned with the team’s.

What did we learn from the feedback?

A lot! The main thing we learned is that we could definitely optimize our game better if we want it to run on more machines. One player was also confused from time to time, which shows we could have improved things like GUI or adding some tooltips/tutorials. One thing we noticed was that they didn’t mention the environment at all. We think that this means there’s room to make the environment pop out and look better as well. The players also tend to share our same desires for additions: more levels and more color mechanics. Right now, our game is pretty limited to simple puzzles that don’t necessarily showcase the mechanics of the color swapping or the physics and movement we implemented. We know we’d love to make it more kinetic and let players be more creative. It seems the foundation is there, we just didn’t build enough on top of it to make it more compelling. All great advice for future us.

We’ll see if more feedback trickles in, but until then, this has been our second blog post! Thank you for reading, playing, and leaving feedback!