We are back from the Finnish digital consumer electronics fair called DigiExpo after having playtested our game for 3 days. We had people around playing the game and watching the trailer all the time, we were so excited about all the players and feedback!
We had the Gauntlet (endless) mode available to play for people and we got a ton of suggestions, ideas, feedback and took a good few hours today to go through it all and evaluate them.
Playtesting is a very valuable resource, especially when you can instantly see people’s reactions to picking up the game. We also got to test our game with people in our target group and feel like they are seeing our vision!
We want to share some feedback we thought and what we decided in the end!
We gathered 60 points in our doc, but I won’t go through them all, haha. There were a lot of bugs we were conscious about, and are fixing them during the next few weeks. (Sword collider takes damage, animation idle bug, etc.)
- Players seemed to be confused if asteroids are enemies or not. We were thinking of the first enemy being a turret on top of the asteroid - this way players will know that both asteroids and enemies are villains. We only had asteroids coming at players first, and some people tried collecting them.
- Testers generally liked the drone next to the player indicating health, and we are working to make it more noticeable (like the players as well, colored trails, outer glows, etc)
- Invulnerable dash and healing features were suggested, and we are still thinking about those. One of the melee weapon types will be a shield weapon so it will kind of work as that "invulnerability" that people were looking for.
- People had a lot of ideas about re-spawning as well, we thought that at death the player would leave its drone behind and being near it will resurrect the player. (without powerups). It could be added as a customizable option in the gameplay settings.
- Having levels that scroll up or down as well - maybe an underwater level with players sinking into a shaft? We thought it would look quite cool! :)
- Some players would’ve wanted to see their individual scores at all times - we’re adding it to the post-game lobby. We were also thinking about a visual effect for the player who is gathering the most points. After the level players will be shown their scores/stats/deaths.
- We had originally designed kind of continuous enemy design but got a lot of feedback that some type of wave spawning is more rewarding to the player. So we will be testing around creating cool waves / sub waves that spawn enemies in certain formations to make the gameplay more interesting.
A lot of great ideas. It was so exciting to see all types of people trying and enjoying the game. We are working hard for the Greenlight-version, 4 weeks!
By the way, our trailer music is absolutely kick-ass, you should go listen to the full version of the song on Soundcloud, made by our music guy Matias. If you haven't watched the trailer yet, watch it here.
Until next time,
Minna
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You can also find us here:
www.facebook.com/stardustgalaxywarriors
www.stardustgalaxywarriors.com
cool music