Dine N’ Bash Playtest Report Sample

Context:

Early Development of Dine N’ Bash, used Unity Engine at the time as our custom engine was still being made and we needed to test and iterate on features, UI, and player experience.

Project Specs

Type of Project: Academic Team (10 People)

Role: UI/UX Designer

Length of Project: 8 Months

Overview

Dine N’ Bash is a top-down time management game where the player is tasked to deliver food to customers in a Tavern. The twist is that when customers aren’t delivered their food in time, they throw things at the customer making it a pseudo-bullet hell. This page highlights the key findings from one of many playtests I ran.

The Playtest

The playtest was conducted as a participation observation study online through Discord, and I asked both participants to have their video camera on as well as stream their gameplay. Before pressing play, I told my participants that “the game was an in development game that the User Research class had given us to run a mock study on”. This was done to ensure that my participants would speak freely about how they felt about the game, this is especially important as the participants were people I am very familiar with and the bias would have been much more significant.

I ran the playtest for about 5 minutes each, I capped it internally at a max of ten minutes, but both play testers wanted to stop at around 5 minutes. During each of the 5 minutes I took notes on my notepad, making sure to document key moments related to the research question as well as moments of general arousal from the participants.

Findings

· Players aren’t understanding that our delivery system works on a First In Last Out system.

· The grade system is very engaging and tends to persuade players to try again

· Players don’t understand why they’re being shot at

· Players need to pick up a plate of food before they realize that the customers aren’t enemies at the start.

Recomendations

  • For players not understanding the stacking or FILO mechanic, it might just be best to playtest a different version of the inventory system without FILO and instead allow the player to deliver the plates in any order they want. This could be problematic as it gets rid of or lessens the small tactical decisions we want the player to constantly be making.

  • For players not understanding why they’re being shot, I think a good fix to this would be adding additional signifiers to the customers as they get progressively angrier such as smoke and face changes on their sprite, and a bar that tells the player exactly how long they have until they reach their limit.

  • Finally, for players who don’t realize customers are friendly at the start, having their sprites be in good spirits and generally friendly will help a lot with the player onboarding.