Week 12 - Game Testing

KIT109 – Game Testing

This week’s DevLog is the final DevLog and it is all about testing and tweaking.

In this week’s tutorial, we were able to share our game’s current state and receive feedback on the game. We were able to test other student’s games and give them feedback as well. From the testing session, I was able to receive some feedback on the game so far and see what others think I could do to improve the game. The other students gave some feedback on things I already knew needed improving and some gave some feedback on things that I have never thought of. Overall, I took it all on board and I updated my game, as necessary. The most notable thing from the feedback I received was that there were no bugs or glitches in the game which was a good sign at this stage of the build.

My main piece of feedback that everyone touched on, was that the game required more levels which I already knew as I had not worked out level progression at this stage. Another common one was about a reset button when the player died so this is what I decided to address first. During my own testing before releasing a build to my peers for testing, I thought that I had created a reset menu after the player died but on further investigation after the testing session, I discovered that it indeed was not working correctly so I needed to fix this issue. I realised that I had changed the name of the scene that the death end screen was on so it was not loading correctly. I edited and updated the end death scene so that there was a reset button instead of just a back to menu button. This required a little change to the code so that I was able to reset back to the first level and reset the score and the lives back to their default starting values.

Updated death screen and game reset

The level progression was next on my to-do list as this was one of the most important parts of the game. It was clear that I needed the levels as my peers told me in the feedback form during the testing session. I needed a way to track which level the player was on and for that to increment when the player collects all the stars in that particular level. I needed to include this value in the PlayerPrefs in my code like the score and the lives so that it would retain its value over the course of the game. Once this working correctly, I could now finish off creating the levels so that the game can be finished. I also added the level the player is on in each level and changed the font of the score and changed the lives so that a numerical value is shown instead of just showing the amount by using several sprites

Level Progression

I addressed a couple of other suggestions from my peers. One person suggested that I should use a different platform design to what I used for the border of the level. I fixed this by changing the platforms to all the same type eg. the snowy platforms. In each level, they will remain the same type but they may change shapes. Others suggested some difficulty increase. I addressed this by changing the speed of the enemies in later levels and the number of enemies in each level. Another suggestion was to be able to slide on the slopes. This could be easily done I would just need to change the layer of the slope so that the player can only slide and not jump on it.

Some things were suggested but I decided to just ignore them for their own reasons. A suggestion was made to make the jump height variable so that the longer the player holds down the jump key the higher the player will jump. As this game is based on the 80s arcade game Bomb Jack, in this game the jumping mechanics are very similar to what is in Bomb Jack so if I am trying to replicate that kind of jumping, I can not change the jumping mechanics in this game. Another suggestion was to allow the player to kill the enemies by “goomba stomping” them. This could possibly be achievable by adding some colliders and changing some code but for now, I will just ignore this piece of feedback but it could be implemented at a later date.