BreakwaterGame

Last week was all about testing. Preparing the testing, scheduling it and actually executing it.

We set up goals for what we wanted to be in and then worked all week to get them in. There was quite a lot of stress involved but we pushed through and got done in time. The final fixes were actually made Friday morning, an hour before the first testers showed up.

There were 25 testers, mostly developers from other project groups, divided into groups of six and put on a schedule. Every group had time for two play sessions, each taking around ten minutes and then were given some coffee and a form to fill out. I think that at this point it was really important that we were three people handling the testing. Someone could always greet the testers, get them set up and started while someone would serve coffee and answer any questions from the exiting group.

So what did we learn?

We were mostly notified of some tweaks that needed to be made. It was far too easy to burst down other ships so the overall damage of certain abilities had to be lowered. The towers were a bit easy to kill. We want the game to be quicker than other MOBAs but that doesn’t mean that you should just be able to kill every tower on your own after a couple of minutes. We are currently fixing this by making the tower attacks a bit stronger.

Of course some bugs were found. The funniest one in my opinion was concerning sunken ships. During the week the graphical team had worked on and implemented a great animation for the sinking ships. There was a bug with the collisions tho so sometimes when a ship that was still alive went over a sinking ship they would interlock and make it appear like you were dragging you fallen enemies around on the battlefield

There were also some small bugs concerning the pathing of the smaller “creep” ships that is being worked on at the moment.

One thing that we want from the game is that it’s easy to learn and the tests showed just that. The first game of every test session was tentative and the players read every ability to check what it did. The second game was all out war, you could see the testers getting into it and really enjoying the experience!

All in all, everyone were happy and had a lot of fun which is exactly what we were aiming for.

Eleven days until the final presentation, hopefully everything keeps going as planned!

You find more about the game at:
facebook.com/breakwatergame
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twitter.com/breakwatergame