Dev Diary 6: The Importance Of Playtesting
Currently the status of Lab 77 is as follows:
57 of 74 bugs have been dealt with. Of the remaining 17, four require further work and 13 require further testing to determine whether the implemented fixes have worked.
Artwork, Music, sound design, scripting and voice acting work is all in progress.
In the past two weeks I had the chance to do some comprehensive playtesting of the newly implemented levels. This playtesting resulted in 20 new bugs that I have since tried to deal with. As such not much work has been done on implementing any new features, except for an attempt at giving a visual indication of the jump status and a particle system.
Both of the above mentioned new features presented their own challenges. With the indication of jump status, meaning whether you have used one or two jumps, I attempted to both change the colour of the player character sprite and its transparency. However, neither option really produced results that I have been happy with. Thus this is something I will have to work further on in the coming weeks.
Implementing the particle system presented a new and annoying part of working with Unity in 2D. How the Z axis sometimes matters and sometimes doesn't. And how the preview does not mirror what happens in game. To explain further, the issue with the Z axis is that while most objects in the game use a layering system to determine which order they appear in, the particle system uses the Z axis.
These last two weeks have reinforced why testing in general matters. All of the pre planning you can possibly do will never fully replicate the need for taking the time to get actual people to test your game will do. Especially with regards to finding errors, bugs and omissions. This also matters for the perception of your game. Unfortunately larger companies can afford to release buggy pieces of effectively bloatware, however smaller companies need to do twice as much to even get in with a fighting chance because so much more is on the line. However playtesting, getting to see people other than yourself playing your game, makes it all worth it.
That is all for this dev diary. Getting back to work has taken longer than I would like but I am slowly getting there. Next update will likely be in two weeks.
Thank you for reading
- Olav