SaED Week 8: Beta Test Week 2

26/04/21 - 30/04/21

Veteran Feedback

Now with an updated build, I was curious about how the veteran tester felt about the changes implemented in accordance with the wishes of the novice tester. Overall, he thought the changes to make the game more user-friendly for newer players were great. Even though he was able to blaze through the playthrough this week faster than ever before, he understood my intentions and agreed that overall, the game was more inviting to play. Because of his easier time through this session, he was able to identify some further cracks that were not as noticeable before, but now posed a threat to the overall balance of the game.

He thought that with the game speed overall now being slower, the electric and freeze towers felt slightly overpowered. I noticed this while observing him playtesting; he abused the generous firing rate of both these towers and was able to take down waves of enemies very quickly. This is something I will consider for the next session, as I also noticed how overpowered it could become at times, therefore affecting the game’s balance as a whole becoming trivialised. He was happy to experiment with all the different towers and was pleased that when he abused the electric and frost towers’ abilities, he could make the other towers in the game equally strong in conjunction with them.

He was disappointed, however, to find out that in this situation every tower did indeed synergise a little too well with every other tower, apart from the splasher. To help test this even further, he placed the splash tower alone in the second half of the map and allowed some creeps to pass by unscathed and reach it. He felt the damage that the splash tower delivered was weak and overall was less than that of the arbalest. This is something I noticed myself while testing, but I thought the splash damage that spreads from the initial projectile would be enough to make up for this, but apparently it was not. It will be investigated further during this week.

The flame tower is easily the favourite tower to be used by the veteran tester. He used it more than any other and found it immensely satisfying when it took down lines of creeps with relative ease. He was nervous enough to admit this to me, and even though I was aware that he knew it was slightly overpowered, he pleaded for it to remain untouched due to the fun he had with it. Upon getting a second opinion from the novice tester, even though he did not find the same level of satisfaction in using the flame tower, he could see how it could be abused by more experienced players. In order to reach some sort of compromise with the veteran tester, I have decided to keep the DPS that is given off by the flame tower but, in order to keep it from being abusive, I will probably make it take up slightly more of the player’s resources or double its build time. I am also a big fan of the flame tower, but I am hoping that this slight change does not lessen the enjoyment experienced by the veteran tester later in the week. One final thing that was revealed by the veteran tester again related to the pacing of the waves. Even though he thinks the content within each one is good, he still thinks the pace continues for longer than is necessary. There were times while observing, when I saw the veteran tester tap his fingers on the table, which was a clear indication that he was waiting for the next wave to start. I will have to see how the novice tester performs this week in order to determine whether or not I can appease the veteran tester.

After making these changes during the week, the veteran tester returned to carry out an additional three playthroughs. While he was disappointed that I made changes to the flame tower, he understood why I put them in place and he thought that by me making it harder to get to, in terms of resources and time, I had managed to enhance the satisfaction of using it overall. The veteran tester seemed less bored during the playthroughs, due to the waves being carried out slightly faster to make overall enjoyment a lot more consistent. He also thought that sticking to only one version of the frost and electric tower was a good idea, as it meant they were in the middle ground with their former upgraded counterparts and were more simplified and less muddled than before.

Changes to be Made (Session 1, Week 2, Veteran)

-Nerf the power of the upgraded frost and electric tower or remove them altogether.

-Make the price of the flame tower more expensive and build time longer to prevent it being spammed too frequently.

-Make the length of waves slightly shorter to make pacing smoother.

-Make splash tower cause slightly more damage.

Novice Feedback

More determined than ever, the novice tester returned. Since it had been a while for him to get back into the groove of playing, he lost a couple of lives early on with the initial waves, but quickly remembered the function of each of the towers and creeps. During the process of him trying to get back in the comfortable position he was in last week with the game, the speed creeps took him off guard again.

Something that I might do to prevent this from happening again in the future, is to decrease the walk speed for these creeps even further or possibly make another version of them, if given the time. This will make them start out slower than usual in the first half of the waves and return to their normal speed whenever players are already in the thick of it.

While during the last occasion the novice tester was able to experiment and place his towers wherever he pleased, through observation I noticed that he did not have that much freedom on this occasion. This is something I would like to revisit, since last week when I rebalanced some of the towers, I forgot to change the cost of them accordingly. I will have to wait for feedback from the tester later in the week about these changes and ask if the amount of freedom he experienced in session two was more than that in session one. The novice tester still seems to have a problem with creep synergy. Through observation, I noticed the worry on his face every time a buff creeper entered the fold and joined together with its brethren.

To help circumvent this in the future, I will decrease the number of buff creeps entering at any one time so that players may have more time to prepare for them.

Finally, I noticed the insistence of the novice tester to consistently use the arbalest tower. When I asked him to elaborate on why he liked it so much, he commented that it was due to its simplistic nature and cheap cost. To help teach the novice tester more about tower synergy and the worth that other towers have, I decided to decrease the arbalest’s rate of fire slightly, so that he would hopefully be encouraged, during the next session, to try out more styles of gameplay.

At the end of the week, after these changes were made, the novice tester carried out a further three playthroughs. He had a confused look on his face whenever he realised his arbalests were not being as effective as before, but this luckily made him experiment with other towers. At the end of the first playthrough, he told me that he now realised the potential in the other towers and during the next two playthroughs, I observed him using every tower the game has to offer. He also no longer felt that neither the speed creeps were overwhelming early on, nor the buff creeps were overwhelming later on. By the end of the session, the novice tester was pleased with the changes and he felt he had learned a lot.

Changes to be Made (Session 1, Week 2, Novice)

-Decrease the walk speed of the speed creeps slightly or make them faster as the waves go on.

-Return the amount of initial players’ gold back to normal in accordance with newer tower balancing.

-Decrease the amount of buff creeps entering at one time.

-Decrease the rate of fire of the arbalest tower.