So I made a previous post about how i approached gathering feedback from the play-testing sessions, this time i will write about how that feedback influenced our game.
Now the first thing I need to make clear is that the feedback has barely impacted anything major in our game that already exists and I’ll try to explain why. The biggest reason is usually because of a shift of focus on what is worked on. For example; from the latest play-testing session we received a lot of feedback on the teleport ability that our ship has, it was clear from this that the teleport needed a lot more polish. But what ended up happening instead was that a new ability was added to the ship instead, not to replace, but i suppose you could say ‘hide’ the flaws of the teleport. This new ability are missiles, unfortunately they were implemented shortly after the second play-testing session took place.
An early iteration of the missiles hanging out around the ship
Now I do think the missiles are a good addition to our game. However, with only a week left of game polish left at the time I’m writing this, the missiles won’t get to receive any feedback the same way the teleportation. Also neither of the abilities will get enough deserved time to be polished.
Another common feedback answer was on the game’s difficulty, almost all testers agreed that the game was way too hard. This was mostly due to the fact that I had designed the layout of our testing level to swarm the testers with enemies. What ended up happening was not redesigning the map or spawn rate of the enemies, but ramping up the power level of the player ship. The new missiles mostly contribute to this, but also small changes like allowing the primary fire harpoon of the ship to pierce enemies, making the previously weak harpoon to feel infinitely more powerful if you line up the shots just right.
some of the feedback we received
So for the most part the feedback has been useful for tweaking numbers within our game, such as the movement for the player ship constantly changing and taking the comments from the feedback on it to find that sweet spot.
David Åström Game Blogg 
Hello there David, my name is Carl, I am the Lead Designer and Lead Sound of Group T, and I am the one reading and giving your blog some comments and feedback this time.
Very intresting way of using the feedback you recieved from the playtesting about the teleport ability. Before reading the text I sort of just took a shot in the dark, and assumed it would be a normal text explaining that the feedback made you guys change the item that the tester’s were complaining about, but instead you guys tried to do a “cover up” of your mistakes/flaws with another ability. Unfortunate that the missiles was implemented after the playtesting so you could not get any feedback from it.
The second part was exactly what I was expecting when I started reading this post. It is intresting as well that when getting criticism you did not think of changing the map or the spawnrate of the enemies but instead buffed the player. Do you have any main reason to why you give the player more power instead of reducing the amounts of enemies? Eitherway, it was good that still you managed to be able to use the feedback to balance out the game.
It was unfortunate about the polishing, but I hope it works out!
Good luck with the remaining days of the project!
– Group T, Carl HvB
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