Drone Swarm Raid
Looking Back
I decided that I wanted to take an old project I had worked on and test it to better my experience and ability to test and write up about the data collected and how best to act upon that data and explain it to a possible team.
I picked an arcade-type shooter I had made a few months back; I was not able to test it that much, nor do I feel that it is that well designed. Because of this, I picked it and have decided to perform some surveys and playtesters on it to answer questions that I want more feedback on. Then, write up a report that explains all my findings in an easy-to-understand manner with reasonable changes a possible development team could accomplish.
Survey and Questions
Coming back to the project and looking it over, I decided to come up with a few questions I wanted to see the results of first. These mostly revolving around the game's difficulty as I recall while working on it, I had run into some feedback from what tests I had down that the game was too difficult.
There are also some other questions I was interested in hearing testers' feedback on, so with these in mind. I went and created a survey and sent the game out to student peers and some friends to test with the knowledge that some results may be biased to a degree due to friendship. To somewhat avoid this issue, I made the answers anonymous.
From there, I asked questions about player feelings towards the enemy's speed and danger, how much they died, how much they moved, and if they had to move.
Current Feedback
I asked the players how much they felt they died in the game; my goal here was to first gauge if the player happened to die a lot or not at all. The results I got indicate a decent amount of deaths per player, with 3/5 of the respondents saying they died about 4-6 times, with 1 saying that they died 7 or more times.
The amount of deaths seems higher than I would want it but is not enough to go off of yet, especially with the amount of testers being so low. But the data itself can still be useful and help show connections with other data sets later.
With the data being looked at at the right, I was asking about the players' thoughts on the first enemy type in the game. These enemies only move to the player, and upon collision, the player loses, so all the player has to do is avoid and shoot them.
First, I asked about how players felt about the enemy's speed. As an enemy that only moves, its speed would be the difficulty of the drone, and 3/5 said that the enemy was slow, and 2/5 felt neutral on their speed.
When asked how dangerous they were, 4/5 said they didn't see the enemy as dangerous, 1 of them even saying they strongly disagreed with that. But 1/5 of the testers did say that they felt the unit was dangerous; again, this comes down to a larger set of data points being needed, but at the moment, it seems the first drone type is slow and not very dangerous to players.
This, combined with the first set of data on player death, leads me to believe that it wasn't these units that most players dead against, thus meaning that the deaths occurred in a later section of the game as enemy units increased in amount and type later in the game.
With this set of data to the left, I asked the players their thoughts on the second enemy type. This type moves slower than the other type towards the player but shoots bullets at the player's position.
Here the data shows that a majority of players felt that this enemy type was much more threatening, with 4/5 saying that they would agree with these enemies being dangerous, versus the 4/5 that had said the prior enemy type wasn't dangerous.
Another interesting data point here is that players seemed more torn on the speed of this enemy type, 2/5 saying it was fast, 2/5 saying they were neutral, and only 1/5 saying it was slow. The interesting thing about this is that the enemy type itself is slower than the prior type, the bullets it shoots are what's fast, but instead, 4/5 of the players said they were neutral on the bullet's speed with only 1/5 saying it was fast. This is interesting as it does show that this enemy type is definitely an increase in difficulty. Thus I can assume this enemy type and the boss wave, which is a similar type that had similar data results, are the cause of most player deaths.
In a later question, most players said they enjoyed the game, with 4/5 saying they enjoyed it and 1/5 neutral. But this data is worth keeping track of, especially with more responses, as I want to avoid a case in which there is just a sudden difficulty spike in the middle of the game cause this enemy type shows up. I want to try and have a curve in difficulty in the game, and this type seems just to be a lot harder than the prior type.
Here I asked about the level, both the player's ability to move and the need to move. I asked this because a player can just sit at spawn and shoot down all the drones that come near, which I felt would have been a big show of the game not being hard enough. But from what was gathered, it seems that a majority of players moved around the level and also felt that they even needed to survive.
This is good to know as it shows that the players can't just sit and win but has to move and dodge, 4/5 saying that they needed to move to win, and with all the players saying that it was easy to move around in, that also shows that the controls and the map won't harm the player's need to move around.
Plan Moving Forward
I'm not done with this project, so moving forward, I'm going to try and get more players to play through my game and fill in the survey so that I can get more data per question to see if there are meaningful conclusions I can think about. I feel like the shooting type enemy will have similar results, but I want to know how the first enemy type and the level questions change with an increase in the number of players answering the survey.
As for what I will be doing afterward, I will try and run some in-person tests and get the data from watching a person play the game live. As well as create a new survey to ask more specific questions in terms of the enemy types and progression of waves as I feel at the moment that the game is having more of a difficulty spike rather than curve once the shooters are introduced. I worry that with some players, that might be frustrating or too difficult.
Along with that, I will be looking at the player's understanding of the game, for example, the enemy types look similar except their color, so I'd like to ask them about that as well as the medals and UI of the player to see their understanding of the game is.