Over the two semesters we worked on it, we iterated through a lot of design ideas. In fact, while our original idea was essentially the same, many of the specific mechanics we had planned ended up wildly different. We had planned to make the game about a secret agent who wielded a sword made out of particles, but creating good animations were too time-consuming and challenging for us to continue down that path. Eventually we decided on switching our main character to a robot that had loose "fists" that it could use to attack enemies. Even the time abilities our character had we changed for more intuitive powers.
For example, before we changed a lot of our design, when using the fast time power, everything would move much faster, and when attacking, the player shot a concentrated burst of particles in front of him, damaging any enemy within a short range. After playtesting, we realized that though the player could move and attack faster, having the enemies move and attack faster as well turned the ability into a detriment, and caused players to avoid using it. We decided to completely change the power, and instead made it a type of boost, where the player could boost quickly in a direction controlled by the arrow keys, and, if they hit an enemy, would initiate a spinning fist attack. After more playtesting, this turned out to be the best decision we could have made; this power turned out to be everyone's favorite.
While I would like to say that playtesting drove our gameplay, we only got the chance to playtest a lot nearing the end of development. The playtesting feedback we did get was extremely valuable, and helped our game immensely; for instance, in the beta version (shown in the video), the floor tiles the player stepped on changed different colors, including to be red in some cases. Many people thought that the colors meant something, and that red was dangerous; after realizing this, we changed the coloring so that the tiles only turned green. We also used this idea for our final boss, who would spawn columns of damaging particles out of the floor, and colored the dangerous tiles red to indicate which ones would be the most dangerous.
Playtesting feedback like that was incredibly valuable, and I only wish that we would have started sooner; finding that people liked the fast forward power the most early on may have ended up changing our whole design, and that, I suppose, is what this whole post is about. If we had started playtesting earlier, we would have ended up with a different game. A better game. One that was more fun to play, because people would have told us what they liked, and we would have given them more of it. I think that if you start with an idea, implement the bare bones of it, let people tell you what they think is fun, and use that for the next iteration of the game, the game will be stronger than the original design every time. Design ideas can look great on paper; we thought that making the slow time power make your gravity force less so that you can have more control and time in the air was a good idea, but everyone's response was "Why does slow make you fly?" It was unintuitive, and the playtesters told us that.
Think about if every game was developed by listening to playtesters. Obviously, some people can have some really weird and unrealistic ideas, but, barring those, a group consensus will basically always be right. It takes a good designer to design a fun game, but it takes a great designer to listen to people say what they think needs to change about the design. Great games have great designers. Great games have been playtested and polished into shining jewels. My passion is to make polished games, and I hope we'll reach that goal this year.
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