During the production of our “Shoot em up” game, we have had couple of playtests. For the first test, we made a survey with 4 questions. We had received 22 responses. As for the second playtest, we just asked the players what they did not like about the game and how to improve it. The purpose of playtesting was to get feedback on the game and maybe some advices on how to fix some problems.
During the Alpha playtest, we basically knew the issues of our game, so the feedback we got was not much useful because everybody pointed to the same known problems. The main problem was the movement, which was not feeling as a boat. Some people said it felt like boat is going through the mud instead of water, others said it was more like a car. There were many different opinions and there was not one which would dominate. For some testers, it seemed that the movement was too slow and for others it felt too fast. So, the feedback was not that helpful. We knew that the boat movement had to be adjusted, but it was not an easy thing to do. We got the same complain during the Beta playtesting as well. However, after we added 8 direction movement, because of 45-degree perspective angle, and animation of the wave behind the boat, it felt much better.
The other more common complain we got was that enemies were not much challenging and too easy. For the Alpha playtesting, it was hard to say about enemies, because we had hearts as placeholders and it was a bit confusing for some people. But we still received feedback that they were quite easy. As for the Beta testing, we had only one type of the enemy and again testers said that it was easy to fight them. As a solution for this, we added 2 more type of enemies and some of them had faster speed, which made them more challenging. We tried to balance the difficulty level and at the beginning of the game there are not that many enemies, but getting closer to the boss, more enemies appear. Also, when the boss activated and the player is running away, then the boss spawns more enemies and it makes the game more difficult. Now we feel quite satisfied with the difficulty of the enemies and the game.
Finally, I could say that although not all of the feedback was useful, but we did get some good advices. Therefore, since the game is made for the public, I think it is very important to listen to what people want from the game and how to improve it. Even though some comments might be useless, but if we select the serious comments, then we get the good idea how to make things better. In my opinion, the feedback which we received helped us to decide where we needed to improve and how.
Kristina’s “Shoot em up” game project 
Hello Kristina!
Thank you for a good read!
You made it clear that you were writing about the alpha and beta playtesting sessions as well as how you collected data during the alpha presentation. If I understand it correctly you had someone interview the play testers and writing down their replies, though it was not as clear as it could have been.
In addition, you jump back and forth between writing about the alpha and beta presentations in the same paragraphs, it would increase readability a lot if you were to break down your text into smaller paragraphs with subheadings.
I did however find great value in your post, I do share your sentiment that the free-form text submissions were of varying quality to say the least, in terms of how serious the tester approached the questionnaires. Still, while there is bad feedback (for example if someone just says they like or dislike something without providing any other information) any feedback that is provided with an explanation is still good feedback.
Overall, good job, I look forward to reading more of your work!
Regards, Erik Rosenberg
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Hi Kristina!
Very concise post. I feel as if many of the Umibozu games share a similar challenge in getting the controls just right. This is an issue that just comes with the fact that the avatar is a boat. Animations are a very important part of making controls feel better. While it is technically just an illusion, it gives us something to visually justify why our avatar is moving in such a way. Animation placeholders may have helped you in the early development in Umibozu, since animations so early on are time consuming and subject to change, but massively impact the feel of the game during playtesting. Your issue with the enemies being confusing was interesting. I think that issue could have been avoided entirely if anything but hearts had been used as placeholders. Overall, great post and I think you explained everything in clear detail. It’s very apparent that playtesting doesn’t always go as planned and feedback is not always consistent.
-Amanda
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Hello. This is Jonathan the programmer from group Siren and I will be commenting on your blog for this week.
First of I want to say that this is a well written blog post and that I think you thoroughly explained what you did and why. I know myself that sometimes playtesting can give very conflicting results, we had similar issues where some players thought our game was too hard while others thought it was too easy and so I agree that sometimes not all feedback is useful but that at the end of the day you are not making the game for yourself but for others.
In summary I think that this is a good blog post with a cleat purpose and it does a good job explaining your thoughts on the playtesting sessions.
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