First playtest

By

After a few months of development, it was time for the first playtest. The person testing the game is a good friend of mine who also playtested Garden: Urada Chapter throughout its development.

The main part of the test is the boss battle of the level. I have some mixed feelings about the design of the boss, but I didn't make any major changes before the test, since I'll probably end up keeping it pretty similar to what it is and make another boss battle in the level that would represent more traditional action RPG boss.

There are also the basic enemies of the level and the prototype of the level itself to play through. The level's intended progression route is complete for testing and populated with the basic enemies with the intention to add a few more unique enemies later on. It also includes the game's save points, and rest stations, at key locations providing resupply of items and checkpoints.

Another area I wanted to discuss with my tester was the game's stat and equipment system, but we ran out of time while testing the boss so that'll have to wait for another time.

Originally my intention was to test the game at my place on my PC, so I could adjust things as needed, but we ended up testing at my friend's place on a considerably older PC, which, to our surprise, ran the game poorly due lack of VRAM at around 20 fps and with considerable input lag. This was because the game defaulted to epic settings. Regardless we were able to proceed with the testing.

I had left the boss quite overtuned mechanic and damage-wise, but my tester was able to get the boss down to around 20% health. Some of the boss' attacks didn't play out properly due to the game running slow, but they ended up having a similar effect on his play than what was designed. Some attacks had random factors in them, which I figured would be unpredictable and annoying, but kept them there in order to get a second opinion.

A few days later I realized that there was a text file for the game's graphic settings that we could have modified for better performance. My friend tried it out with lowered settings and all of the performance issues disappeared and he was able to beat the boss after a few attempts.

Aside from the performance and boss balancing, everything else was working as intended.

Below is a video of the whole boss battle with its core mechanics briefly explained in the description.