A Digital prototype

During this playtest, what I wanted to test out the most were the mechanic and the level design of the game, which I was struggling with the most especially. As a result, I've made a digital prototype with almost no art or sounds at all, but with all 5 levels (except the boss) and all of the other mechanics I planned to have in the game. The code were full of variables for easy changes throughout the playtest, and the levels were not connected yet.

Because the code could be easily iterated, I was able to conduct playtests of 2 versions of the game within the same day, with my classmates as playtesters (since I couldn't make it to the NYU Playtest Thursday).

Version 1

Observations

• The player is extremely overpowered, as there is not limit to how much they can shoot.
• The controls & rules were simple that it took only once to explain
• Instead of getting harder, the player seemed to be able to finish further levels faster due to the increased number of player's followers

Feedbacks

• It gets easier as the games goes on. This is because the player can gain more and more followers each level, which the number could reach up to about 50-60 followers.
• The massive number of followers also slows the game down. In addition, there was a bug that caused the number of followers to skyrocketed to 330.
• It makes sense that the player and followers have no lives since they are already too powerful
• The enemies move slower as the level goes on. This was because I had the camera zooms out each level, so the enemies seem to move slower. This caused a long wait for the player.
• The enemies should shoot the player more frequently to make the gameplay harder.
• It would be good to decrease the number of cells that can become followers since there were a lot of them and they were easy to obtain.
• Enemies' bullets were much slower than the player's

Version 2

I decreased the number of followers the player could obtain and fixed the bug, as well as increased the speed of the enemies as the level progresses. In addition, I made the enemies shoot more frequently and connected the levels

Observations

• With a lot of the numbers changed, the difficulty of the levels were broken.
• There's a bug with the increasing speed from levels to levels, which makes it too difficult for the player
• The waves should spawn faster, as there seemed to be a wait time between each waves with nothing on the screen.
• It seemed to become too difficult from level 3 onwards.
• There's no more lag caused by too many followers

Feedbacks

• The difficulty levels didn't make sense. The first level didn't felt like the first one and the second level was already too hard. This suggests that the number of the variables should be in-between the 1st and 2nd version.
• The waves should come in faster.
• There were too many bullets on the screen. This was due to a bug that spawned double the enemies' numbers than what I had written.
• The player didn't felt powerful anymore, and the cells that could become a follwer becomes more important and desriable to collect. The number of around 10 followers max. seemed to be a good spot.
• The enemies now shoot to frequently that there wasn't enough time to aim at them before getting hit by their bullets.
• The player movement became too slow that it's a bit frustratating and felt impossible to win.