Devlog #3: my first real playtest went badly, and here's what I'm changing
I paid for a remote playtest: a stranger on a Windows laptop played BOMBBONK in the browser for 15 minutes while talking out loud. It was humbling.
Fun 3.5 stars, but "would play again" and "would recommend" got 1.5. And the little guy I'd spent days giving a personality? "Round head bomber. No not really."
What went wrong:
- He was playing an old build. My itch page was still serving a version from before the browser performance fixes, so the page froze when he hit fullscreen and the game lagged for the first few minutes ("pretty unplayable"). That's fixed: the page now runs the current build.
- He didn't know how not to die. He kept blowing himself up and said it "needs a tutorial level or something".
- Kick seemed broken, and for good reason: it only reached 2.8 m, but a tile is 3 m.
- He couldn't understand the upgrade cards ("arms two, count one"?).
- Too many enemies, too fast, while he was still learning the controls.
What's coming in the next build:
- A guided first layer that teaches one thing at a time: drop a bomb, GET OUT OF THE CROSS, kick, one slow guardian, a seal, then the goal. Your own blasts don't hurt you until you've got it, and you can skip it.
- Upgrade cards in plain words: what it does, and the numbers before and after ("Bombs at once 1 → 2").
- Kick that works, plus a "nothing to kick" hint when you press E with no bomb nearby.
- Remote bombs are gone. They confused me too.
- Bigger hearts, and only slow guardians on the first layer.
- Each layer deeper gets its own colours, so layer 2 no longer looks like layer 1.
My lesson: watch a stranger play before polishing anything else. I'll run another session on the new build and post how it goes.
Has a playtest ever flipped your priorities like this? I'd love to hear about it.