Crab Meat: Playtest Questionnaire’s

Tiger Collins
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

During development for Crab Meat, we had multiple playtests and surveys for testers to complete, but I can’t just give them any old question, I had to ask specific questions, and with that information, I was able to pivot my work to match the questions that I’ve asked.

On the 7/8/2017, we play tested Crab Meat once it was on itch.io to try and get some further post-release feedback. We only received 4 completed questionnaires during this playtest but the results were as follows;

Questionnaire responses — 7/8/2017

In the past, we had people say that the cut scene or comic strip wasn’t too clear on what was going on during it, so I included a question about if people knew what the project was about. Judging from the feedback that I received on the latest questionnaire, I wouldn’t have to redo the introduction comic strip to convey the story. However, the test did show that if people skipped the comic strip, they assumed that the game was about a Crab moving boulders around, so to fix that, I made it so that the comic strip couldn’t be skipped straight away.

Most people completed roughly 11–15 levels, indicating that levels in that area are boring but because I recorded the playtest, and could review the footage — Which revealed that people found the levels a bit too confusing in some areas. To resolve this, I made the levels more straightforward and simple to complete and that seemed to have resolved the issue in a following playtest.

The questions that I asked seemed a bit random and pointless, as reviewing the footage could’ve told me the general answer to a lot of these. However, I wanted to know how the player felt, so asking questions such as ‘How difficult do you think the levels are’, allowed me to gauge what the player was thinking of the project. The following are the questions that I featured on the questionnaire and why.

  • ‘From the intro, what do you think the game is about?’ I wanted to know if the player had an idea of what the story was of the project.
  • ‘How many levels did you complete?’I wanted to see if the player remembers the levels that they completed.
  • ‘How difficult did you find the levels?’I needed to know if the players found the levels too difficult.
  • ‘Did you understand how Ice worked?’As Ice was a new feature, I wanted to see how player interacted with it.
  • ‘What platform did you play on?’Some bugs may occur from platform to platform, and so does the experience, so I needed to know what platform the project was played on.
  • ‘How did the music make you feel?’ We just received new audio from the Audio Designers, and I wanted to see if the audio fit the project.
  • ‘Do you or have you studied Game Design before?’Game Designers think differently to a general videogame player, so I need to know if an opinion is skewed because of their discipline.
  • ‘Anything else you’d like to say?’ Sometimes, there are bugs that were not expected and this is a question framed for that.

Unfortunately, not every question was answered in the questionnaire — Specifically ‘What platform did you play on?’, ‘Do you or have ever studied Game Design?’ as well as ‘Is there anything else you’d like to say?’. Luckily, some of the more project design orientated questions were compulsory to answer and I even took notes from what people were saying after the playtest, so I didn’t need to worry too much about the questionnaire being a waste of time. Asking the questions in the questionnaire, allowed me to easily repeat the answer if someone asked me as it’d be fresh in my mind from writing it down.

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