Playtesting Level One

We’ve started playtesting - we’re finally at the tail end of the first level! Cue the celebration music!

Over the last week, Jackson took on the role of testing lead and had our testers play the most current build of level one in Vicseral Carnage.

“This week we decided to do some testing, and as the test lead I was in charge of putting everything together to get our testing done. We wanted to get a solid idea of what people thought about the gameplay and how smooth the game felt to play as at this point the game is feature complete. Play testing also allowed us to observe any bugs that may have come up during the gameplay, so we can sort those out as quickly as we possibly can.  

I set up questions for the testers to answer as well as having a few notes myself in case I observe anything that may have shown up during testing that the players may not have seen. Through testing I thankfully didn’t actually see any bugs that we didn’t know about already which is great! We have a list of bugs that we are working through and so far no new obvious bugs is amazing, and it means that we can focus on getting those done and dusted. 

Unfortunately we found out that players don’t really understand what the glowing of the enemies heads mean and also how far they will throw objects, which is very sad to hear. For the glowing heads, we might need to adjust the colours of the glow to align a bit more with what people might think being seen is. But for the throwing issue, this might be a problem with the physics that we will have to address as there were a few notes saying that it was floaty and slow, which is definitely an issue that we will need to address.

Another thing that testers noted was that the gun didn’t feel impactful enough, which is an issue that we are already underway of resolving. Our tech lead Deklan is planning on adding a force behind the bullet that makes the models of the enemies move accurately to where they have been shot, e.g if they get shot in the shoulder they will move backwards from that point as if they got shot there. This will hopefully resolve this problem and make the guns feel more punchy and powerful!  

We got some great feedback on the fact that the lighting looks great and it gives off the mood that we want with the only drawback being that we needed more lights in the level for overall illumination, which we were already planning on doing anyway once we have the textures finalised.

The only major issue that showed up during testing is the fact that the player was way too short to actually reach anything on the tables (which is really funny), and thankfully has a very simple to fix. On top of that, we still have the very prevalent issue of players being able to stick their head through the wall. This allows them to just skip walking through the level and dodge being seen by the enemies, which is also a key problem we intend to fix soon. 

From this testing I believe we gathered a lot of great info, and for our next tests I plan on having questions relating more towards the actual visuals of the game beyond just the lighting. I want to have the next round more focused on what the testers think of the game’s visual style, as well as a few minor things about gameplay since hopefully by our next tests we will have fixed the bugs that are in the game currently!” - Jackson (test lead)

By the time the next tests roll around, we’ll more than likely have a fully functioning level one! Over the next week we’ll be finalising and refining the textures, so the environment will really sell the atmosphere and aesthetics of our game.