Witches and Settlers: Reflection
Over the past couple weeks, I have worked on a digital prototype for a game concept. This game concept is a tower defense game based on the prompt: Witches and Settlers. In the game, the player would place different witches on tiles in order to defeat waves of settlers.
I was able to play test this game concept with one of my friends by exporting the game in unity and sending them the build folder. My friend played the game for roughly half an hour between one 7 minute attempt followed by an over 20 minute attempt.
The first thing of note that happened was that he was confused by the point of the game as I chose to not explain anything other than asking him to play a game and it took him until he started to mess with the icons to realize it was a tower defense game.
When it came to giving his thoughts on the four different witch types in the game, his reactions ended up being what I expected them to be. For the fire witch, he commented that since the enemies’ strength came from overwhelming numbers that the witch’s attributes of being powerful but slow made it a bad investment. Another witch that he mentioned problems with was the lightning witch. It was not obvious how exactly it did damage, “I can’t tell if the lightning tower is constantly damaging the enemies, or if it has damage over intervals” along with if it made the difference between one hit or two hits when it came to the other witches. He also did not consider that witch until roughly ten minutes into the second attempt, instead using the standard and ice witch. He did not comment much on the other two besides that they were overall better choices than the rest.
Enemy wise, he simply commented that he wasn’t sure if enemies scaled in health, speed etc and some distinction would help him assess situations better.
Another issue he pointed out was that since the health bar did not stop at zero, meaning there was not a proper game over sequence, that there was no motivation for players to continue to defend their sessions.
His final thoughts were; “the basic concept works just fine; nothing abnormal happened that made me go ‘wait, what?’ Player signaling (tower selection, enemy changes, etc.) would be the first thing I’d hammer home.” To add on to this, I noticed that he never used the mouse wheel to zoom or use ‘wasd’ to move the camera as there was no indication of those inputs doing anything.
I felt like I did take a lot out of this play testing session. While I did foresee some of the issues and comments he would have, he did mention multiple I did not think of and also I was able to realize that some of the problems I put off for later were more important than I thought such as a start and end screen. I definitely believe that I would need to balance the witches way more than I did in order to incentivize players to use other turrets as in the current state, the ice witch is the clear pick due to having the best combination of cost, speed, power along with being able to slow enemies. I believe more than one enemy type would also help fix these balance issues.
Overall, I now know that my priorities were not the best for this game as I failed to properly instruct the player on the goal of the game along with certain controls. I also needed to focus on balancing the game more rather than adding to it as there is no point in adding mechanics if those mechanics lack any real use to players. In the end, my playtester did say he enjoyed the core concept and helped me realize many of the issues with the mechanics.
