Project 1 Questionnaire

When it came time to show off my game for the Wherefore art thou project i was incredibly reluctant for people to play-test it. I believe this is because i myself didn’t enjoy what i had made and believed that it wasn’t in a state that was ready to be seen by others. Whether or not i wanted to i had my game play-tested. Upon reflecting on the questionnaire i had created i realised the questions i asked were both too specific in some c

ircumstances, for example asking if it recreated the source artwork (Kandinsky's Circles in a Circle) and far too vague asking how the players thought the music worked. The only reason i got some relevant answers to that question is because most of the people who tested my game were my friends and had prior knowledge of what i wanted the music to do. I chose the questions i did because to me, my game was all about how it felt to play, the way the audio worked and the player's interaction with the projectiles were paramount to the overall feel of the game.

I had Five players test the game over the period and got to my surprise some positive feedback. The results can be seen in the table below.

The first four responses where a complete surprise to me. People had actually enjoyed the feel of the game and thought that it had created a representation of the source material which was my overall goal. There was some variation in response to the speed of the projectiles which is understandable because i wasn’t able to tweak the values to a place where i was exactly happy with the speed myself. Overall i was happy with this feedback because i realised in some way some players enjoyed what i had made even though i hated it. Then it came time for a player who wasn’t a game student to try my creation. This feedback i received was amazing, the player actually just sat there and moved the cursor thinking that the trail renderer was going to destroy the missile (this was my original intention but changed throughout the project). They found that the game wasn’t recreating the source material and the reason was because they didn’t ever destroy a projectile which would have created the art. This was the best possible feedback i could have gotten, at first it blew my mind that the player didn’t try and click on the objects coming at him. Then when i reflected on this, why would they? I never told the player what to do or how to interact with the game. This lead me to create a much better menu system which also included instructions for the player to left click on the musical notes flying towards them.

Throughout this feedback process even though i was not keen to show my game off, as a game designer it was immensely valuable and showed me things i thought were common knowledge which to people who don’t play games often wouldn’t actually know. I believe this has benefitted not only this project but my projects going forward as i will greatly value feedback negative or positive and use it to better my creation.