Introduction

Today we’re going to talk about feedback and getting the right kind of feedback from your playtesters. We will also take a look at the level design of Great Ape so far. But first, gifs!

Getting Feedback

I have a few key guidelines in mind when designing a feedback form. This isn’t the the best way but simply a way to write your questions, lets begin.

Know who is testing your game

Some might be willing to put a little extra effort, especially people who are also developing games, others might not be as willing to give as much feedback and you’ll have to adjust your questions accordingly. If you’re asking for feedback from a group of unknowns. Try having a bit of everything but not too many questions overall. If there’s too much to write it might scare people off or they might not want to spend so much time writing feedback for your game when they could be playing another one. always remember why they are here in the first place.

Keep it short

Most people will lose interest in a poll or form if it takes too long to fill out. Get to the important questions first and avoid forcing your testers to go on page after page of questions.

Don’t ask the same thing twice

Nobody likes to repeat themselves. Always make sure to go through your questions to clear out any repetitions that might occur.

Use 1-5 points

People love to rate things, much more so than to write a wall of text. It’s nice and simple and something that everyone would be willing to do. Same thing goes for checkboxes and other such useful tools. These can then be used to gather statistics about your game.

Level Design

I’ve recently gone through and redone our tutorial level to incorporate all the things I’ve learned throughout this project but also to add in all the new objects that the player gets to interact with. I’ve gone through and made sure that they know what to do with thought bubbles that indicate which key you need to press. It’s a bit hamfisted but when it comes to keybindings, this is information they need to know. Its of course available in the menu as well however I don’t want to slow them down in any way so I’ve opted for this method.

Never underestimate your players

So, I’ve struggled with one of the levels quite a bit when it comes to creating unbreakable puzzles. Most of the time its simply due to not being able to put myself in the player’s shoes. I try to but I don’t see the problems that arise with certain placements of interactables. One such thing happened on level 2 where someone always seemed to find a way to break one of the puzzles. Thanks to the playtests though I’ve managed to isolate what the problem was and sort it out.

What’s Coming Next?

In the final blog for this project, I will be going through the game and taking a look at how things went aswell as looking at what could have been done better. All in all it’s been an exciting adventure to make this prototype together with my team and we’ll see if it’ll be realised as a full game in the future.