Hello, I am Hampus Bergström, the game designer for the team Wendigo that works on the game Umibōzu. During our course “Game Design 2: game Development” and therefore during development of this game, we have had the chance to playtest our game with all other first year student in the game education. Having such a large number of testers to test our game has helped us a lot to see what to change in or game and more importantly, what changes we should prioritize. We have conducted two external playtesting sessions with the other students as testers, the first one was for our alpha build and the second one was for our beta build.
The alpha testing session focused mostly on the movement mechanics, the aim mechanic, sound effects within our game and the first enemies core characteristics (speed, size etc.). As we had not implemented one of the core mechanics and probably the most game changing mechanic in our game for the alpha, some of the feedback we got did not really help us that much. The mechanic that we didn’t have time to implement was the spotlight/fog mechanic, so the feedback of people saying that the enemies were to easy didn’t help us at all. When we conducted the beta playtesting with the spotlight/fog mechanic, most people complained over that the enemies were to hard instead and we did not balance the enemies between the two testing sessions. But thanks to the alpha playtest we got a lot of valuable feedback for more of the core features such as movement and shooting. For example, after the testing we rebalanced the boat movement completely making it a lot slower and sluggish to get a better “boat feeling”. The alpha test also gave us some information that we didn’t foresee at all, during the testing we noticed that nobody understood that our power-ups were in fact power-ups. The power-ups looked like debris in the water, so most people tried to avoid them, so we had to redo them from scratch.
During the beta playtesting session, the focus was to see if we had fixed the problems that we found during the alpha but more importantly test the spotlight/fog mechanic that we didn’t get a chance to test last time. During the first test sessions we recorded all the feedback by conducting interviews, but we learned from that mistake quickly and change to just hold a survey during the beta. This was not only because it is easier than conducting interview but also because this time around we only needed shorter answers to see if things were balanced or not as only smart changes could be made after the beta test.
The playtesting has helped us a lot in the development, to see things we didn’t notice ourselves, help us prioritize and just get ideas that could help make the game better from the players themselves. The foreshadowing of the Umibōzu and how it is done in our game is exactly such an idea that a tester suggested for us, so we took that idea and developed it even further. Testing is an important part of game development and especially external playtesting.
First image shows the alpha build and the second image shows the beta build of the game.
Hampus Bergström GAME 
Hello Hampus!
Overall, the post seems well structure and easily understandable. However, separating Alpha playtesting from Beta playtesting might increase readability significantly, in my opinion.
It’s unfortunate that you got some unhelpful feedback because of a missing core mechanic, but it’s also good to know that even then, you could get some good ideas and good feedback about other aspects of the game. I think it’s fairly common to have some feedback directed to aspects of the game that are not yet developed (happened the same to our group), but we’ve found that the best thing to do in that case is focus the survey in very determinate elements of the game, be it animations, mechanics, general feelings about something (how boaty was the boat for you?) and yes or no questions. People get tired pretty easily after a couple of surveys!
Changing from recording to surveying seemed like a good choice for having a registry of the feedback. It’s also interesting to see how playtesting has affected your game, in a positive way!
Good job, and good luck on your last playtesting!
P.S. I played both beta and alpha, and I have to say that there was a clear and great improvement. Loved the overall feeling of the game!
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Hi Hampus!
Your post was written in a professional way and you got all the information you wanted out there i seems like. It was easy to follow the text and I got a good understanding of what happen and helped you out during both of the test.
As mentioned in the comment above I also think that writing about the alpha and beta test separately would have made it a little more clear. But it’s did not really matter that much since you did not have that much to write about the Alpha.It’s good though that you mentioned the problems you had too.
The images was helpful and fitting and showed clearly how the game have improved from Alpha to Beta. And I’m happy to hear that the playtesting helped you get to where you are standing now.
Overall it was a good informative text. Keep up the good work and good luck on your game.
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