QA Testing
Playtest Reviews
Technical Summary:
In the final week of Beta, we took part in a playtest on the most recent Beta Package of the game, having the first year classes, who had allowed us to use their spaceships, play and give feedback about the current version of the game. Once again, providing a feedback form to be filled out and recording the individual playthrough's of each player to help us see bugs, errors, and how we can better the experience for the player. During this playtest, I was more than happy to sit and watch the first years explore the map and build an understanding of the game, whist they would play, anything that did standout to me immediately, I noted down on my phone to begin improving as soon as possible so we could focus on other tasks in the Gold Standard Period.
Reflection:
The feedback definitely helped understand that there was a clear lack of understanding in how to navigate the level. We had included the mini-map, which only provides a small capture of the surrounding area, the compass bar, which with no markers feels quite useful, and objectives, which were very often overlooked or didn't correctly function. These were the main takeaways from this playtest, alongside some small issues relating to UI and that the player could escape the map through some strange collision, but all of these helped lay a huge outline as to what we would spend a majority of Gold doing, choosing to improve the more significant features rather than add more and leave them as they are. Unfortunately, I also didn't feel like we were 100% prepared for this playtest since we were in the middle of fixing some issues I'd personally discovered the day before, but we did get some good video footage to review and some significantly more helpful feedback in comparison from Alpha.