Sprint 5

This sprint was good because we had the chance to put together a playtest that gave us a lot more actionable feedback. More than that, it’s also kind of scary because it feels like there’s so much more to do and not enough time to do it. That being said, the game still has to be released and it’s my job to try to guide the game to be the best feeling experience it possibly can. There’s a few things I noticed in observing the playtests this time around that I’m interested in talking about this time around.

Playtest Results: Miscommunication

I wanted to start with these statistics because they’re actually very misleading. If I was looking at these without actually observing the playtests I would say that we’re doing a great job with the color theming of the resources and we don’t need to spend any more time on it. However, playtesters defined resources differently than how I defined them. You see, they saw the ammo pickups out in the open (that are currently using a placeholder model that has a bright yellow top) and assumed those were part of the resources that I was talking about. Watching the playtests, I realized that almost nobody actually picked up what was actually part of the mission objective. This is almost assuredly because the players aren’t properly told what is and isn’t something you should go and pick up.

Playtest Results: Spooky Scary Stealthy

These stats are a bit more encouraging to me. We made some changes to the environment, adding some fog and a new skybox which made everything feel a bit more oppressive and spooky. I was hoping to use this change to encourage more stealthy gameplay from my players, which did seem to work a little bit. Players still tried to shoot zombies right out of the gate and didn’t really sneak around despite the stats saying they felt encouraged to be stealthy.

-Where Are You Going?

One thing to note though is that the player path changed very obviously from the previous playtests on this map. Where before players would always approach the first zombies and move straight on to the center of the map, now all the players were turning left, which was rarely done before. I was confused for a little bit trying to figure out why the sudden change until I realized, the fog. The fog had obscured the vision of the zombies out in the center because they were too far away. Now with the new environmental effects, players could only see zombies to their left, and they went straight for them. The players followed the zombies as their gut instinct. While this isn’t what I’m looking to achieve for the game overall, it was fascinating nonetheless to watch it play out with all the playtesters. For our future map I’m already having conversations with my level designer to let him know not to put zombies right in front of the player when they spawn.