Hello, Max here for another exciting devlog update. Side note: I’m running out of unique ways to start these devlogs, luckily this will be the next to the last one I post. In this devlog I will go into detail on player feedback and what we as a team have done to iterate the game accordingly to suit the players requests.

Roses are red, Violets are blue, in this devlog I have two topics for you:

1. Second Playtest

2. Comparing the playtests

Second Playtest

Good poems aside let’s talk a bit about the player feedback we have been getting both in our latest playtest as well as our first playtest. I will try to analyze two playtests at the end. However this will probably not mean much since only 16 people playtested our game.

We’ll start by talking about the last playtest. For this playtest the game was in a more stable state. For starters you could actually complete the game. Secondly the games main enemy could be considered scary at times.

A major problem we had when having our playtest was that people didn’t want to play our game. Well they seemed interested until we mentioned that it was a horror game. I believe that this response is partly a result of how horror movies and games and lazily made these days, jumpscare at every corner. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Comparing the playtests

Overall the players liked it better compared to the first playtest. Let’s bring in some numbers. After both playtests we asked the testers to fill out a form with questions about the game.

Here are some comparisons between the two playtests:

Did the game feel scary? (Not scary - Very scary)

In the first playtest the score was quite low. I believe this was mostly because of the cylinder enemy we had in the beginning.

In comparison we can see that the testers found the game to be on average more scary.

How was the lighting? (Too Bright - Too Dark)

This was very spread out and therefore not that helpful. If I do another question form I will remember to ask better questions.

In the second test the answers were still very spread out and averaged at the same amount. This isn’t that shocking since there wasn’t any major changes done to the lighting between the two tests.

Did the AI feel smart?

Again pretty vague questioning. We can see that people didn’t think the AI was very intelligent.

In the second test however, the testers felt as the AI was a lot smarter despite only smaller changes where made to the AI in this time. I believe that people think the AI behaves more intelligently when it looks more scary. However we didn’t test if this was the case so for now its just speculation.

As a short summary, the first playtest was held too early in development and had lots of bugs and weird debug text all over the screen. And we didn’t get that much information out of it.

The second time the game was in a much better state and we could actually use the information we got out of it. Unfortunately, at that point in development we didn’t really have time to fix any of the bugs and features since it was one of the last weeks of development.

//Max Dörper