Designer Blog 2

Hello everyone, my name is Vitaliy Palnikov and I am the lead designer for Gummy Gang! This sprint we got to testing our prototype. We had a total of 21 participants and the reception we got was generally positive from the players. What I wanted for this prototype was most of the core components intact, and while some were missing the majority of the concepts were ready by the prototype by build 1 I hope to have the majority of the core components in the game which are laid out in the Design Document.

We asked participants a multitude of questions. The first one was a simple "what is your age?"

This question, while I believe not as important as the other questions, can be nice to know. This can be tied in with our next question, if they usually play co-op games. 

A majority said they do play co-op party games, so we know of those we got to playtest the prototype, 81% of those answered with yes. This indicates that a majority of those who played are indeed part of our audience we are trying to reach. Since this is the case the results of the overall survey are quite valuable. If it was the case that the audience were not the type of individuals to enjoy this type of game the results would have been a little less valuable.  Next up is the controls of the game and what our players thought.

These two statistics are similar in nature however are distinct. A majority of players found it easy to figure out how to control the player from knowing absolutely nothing about the game. This is a positive sign that it is not frustrating to figure out how to move. The same goes for moving the player directly, where only one person gave the stat a two which is a negative connotation to the ability to move the player. We may play around with it a bit but overall the movement is currently positive. Next we will go into how easy or hard the players found the goal of the game was. 

The majority of players felt that it was easy to figure out the goal of the game. That said some did state that it was not easy and this should be worked on to ease the understanding of the overall goal for all players going forward. 

This stat is of great importance to us developers. A lot of players felt that the game in its current state would not continue to play in any capacity. As this is the prototype a lot of features are missing along with some art assets. This was the most predictable statistic on the list. As we develop the game I hope this statistic shifts towards  more favorable player retention. 

That said, all of our play testers let us know that should more features be added then it is all the more likely that they would play our game. This is a great thing to know as a developer that what we have has potential to develop into something greater. This will reinvigorate us to continue working hard to make this game what I know it can be. 

There were some other aspects that needed to be mentioned for this prototype build. This includes what was confusing to the players and bugs. So for a lot of players they would pick the controller up and sit there trying to move the joysticks. In this build the player must press any button to spawn in however a lot of players would sit there for little while and not understand what they were looking at. Once they spawned in, it was fine but before a lot did not understand. This needs to be remedied for build 1, this is not an intended mechanic, just an unfortunate hiccup. The player's avatars are supposed to be there from the start. The most glaring bug was the "falling off the map" bug/ issue. Which will be fixed for build 1.

To sum it all up, the reception to the play test was generally positive. Some parts of the game were missing but the players still seemed to enjoy what was available in this prototype. Some issues are definitely apparent to us and certain issues need to be addressed.