Game Testing

General Overview

Hello and welcome to the final devlog of Forsaken Colony: Last Survivors! This week's devlog will focus on the feedback received during the week 12 (Assignment 3B) testing session and changes/improvements implemented through this feedback.

Player Feedback

The feedback form used for the evaluation was split into several sections; The first section features general question regarding the enjoyment of playing the game, difficulty of the game and intuitiveness of player controls.

With an average level of enjoyment of 8.6 (figure 1) I consider the goal of making the game fun achieved. The difficulty feedback (figure 2) shows a tendency for the game to be a little too easy. Figure 3 confirms that the player controls are good the way they are. Answers to the open ended question at the end of this section (which asked for additional suggestions) mention that the game could be little bit harder in first half of the stage.

The second section on of the feedback form focused on visual/audiovisual assets in the game and how well they blend in. Figure 4 and 5 show the corresponding feedback to each question.

The overall average ratings are 8.2 for graphical elements and 8.0 for music and sound effects which I am very pleased with. All play-testers agreed that the chosen art style for graphical assets as well as the chosen music/sound effects fit the style of the game. A suggestion from one of the testers for improving the sound design was to include more sound effects, especially when the player takes damage. It is hard to notice at times that the player was actually hit by an enemy/enemy projectile.

The third section featured one question regarding bugs in the game; To my relief there were no noticeable bugs at the time of the play-testing (figure 3) :)

The final section of the feedback form featured 3 open ended questions. Those questions and corresponding answers were (not all of the answers are displayed, only some of the most relevant):

• Were there some parts of the game that were particularly frustrating?
  • Game could introduce more variety early
  • Encountering the armored enemies was a little frustrating at first as I skipped all the armor damage skills but this is only an issue for a first playthrough
• Which part(s) of the game did you like the most?
  • The main loop of collecting gems is very fun
  • The large amount of enemies at times is quite exciting
  • The upgrades that dont show their stats were a cool idea […]
  • The progression from weak to super powered one man army is super fun
• What major part of the game still needs improvement / Was there some key functionality missing which you would have expected to be implemented in this game?
  • More enemy variety/needs to get harder earlier
  • A few more varied enemy types, for example a rarer type that can outrun the player
  • Additional sounds, it can feel a little empty with only music

All that feedback combined showed to me that the game was already in a very good state at the time of play-testing; However, some improvements were still to be made before I could finally finish the development of Forsaken Colony: Last Survivors and call it a day.

Notes on the Testing Session

It was very interesting (and a little stressful lol) to see people playing my game for the first time. It seemed to me that most of them already had prior experience with this kind of genre and, therefore, represented the kind of people I would expect in my target audience. This also concluded that gameplay of all of the testers was somewhat similar and mostly in line with what I had expected from people playing my game (note: I didn't explain the game to the play-testers before they started and let them explore it by themselves).

The main benefit, however, was that they all had a fresh and unaltered view on the game in comparison to me. Therefore, they were able to detect missing details/gameplay elements, provide new ideas for improving the overall gameplay and also inspired me to come up with new improvements of my own.

Combined with the feedback I got from the feedback form it became clear to me that there were several major issues in terms of gameplay, which needed adjustment/tinkering before I could release the final version of my game.

Last Improvements and Implemented Changes

New elements/changes to existing elements I decided to introduce for the final version of the game were:

• Enemy movement speed can scale with player movement speed
• This option can be enabled/disabled in the inspector (figure 7).

• New spider enemy type that has 1.5 times the player's movement speed (figure 8) 
• This introduces a new level of challenge to the game as the player was previously able to easily outrun all melee enemies.

• Spawn bursts for enemies
• These are independent from the current spawnrate of the specific enemy type.
• They are defined in the editor by specifying the number of enemies to spawn and at what time they should spawn.
• Figure 9 shows an example of a spawn burst of the newly introduced spider enemy type.

• Adjusted the random spawn position of enemies
• Previously, enemies were spawned randomly on one of the four sides of the screen -> this meant that the player could just keep running into one direction and could easily dodge all spawning enemies as they only had a 25% chance to appear right in front the player.
• Therefore, I changed the number of directions where enemies could spawn to eight (same as the player's movement directions) and adjusted the probability of each spawn position. Now enemies have a 50% chance to spawn in the direction the player is moving to and a 50% chance to spawn on any of the other seven sides.
• This behaviour can be observed in figure 10.

• Adjusted the wave design throughout the stage
  • Especially the early game needed some adjustment as it took too long for other enemies besides the goblin to appear on screen.
  • Added some spawn bursts throughout the stage as this feature was not available before.
• Added sound effect upon taking damage

Final Notes

With all these newly introduced changes I think the game is finally in a state to be considered finish. Looking back, it took me way more time to get the game to this point than I anticipated; That is with having only the most basic features specified in my concept document in the game and dropping almost all the additional content I wanted to implement such as an achievement system, more unique upgrade options for the attack move, different characters, different stages, bestiary, …

It was a lot of fun to build this whole game from scratch and I learned a lot along the way; From a better understanding of the Unity engine over creating art assets on my own to improving my skills in object-oriented-programming with C#. There are still a lot of improvements to be made but I think I am much better game designer than I was two months ago; I hope I can find the time to use these acquired skills for new projects in the future.