I had two of my floor mates playtest my game. One is a female political science major who claims to be “stupid at math” and the other is a hardcore gamer studying computer science. As I had hoped, both players held their own and had a great deal of fun. On the up-side, the game seemed addicting and the controls were easy for the playtesters to understand. Without any instruction, the players both easily understood the goal of the game, and basic methods for achieving that goal. But when it came to the more subtle, unnecessary but fun added features, the players either did not know they existed, or did not know how to use them. For example, it took a few rounds of playing for the testers to realize that power-up that resets your opponent’s score exists and once they did, they had no clue how it was activated. This can be solved by adding visual feedback and a short instruction screen at the beginning of the game, as I had planned but not yet programmed. Also, the number to be reached in the background was not obvious enough to be noticed, but once it was mentioned, both players really liked the feature. I think it just needs to be a more contrasting color.
Another big issue was that both frogs were the same color. This should have been an obvious issue to me, but it never occurred to me to make each player a different color. The color which shows where the player is aiming could then match the color of the player’s frog, instead of being either the ugly white or gray.
The playtesters also noticed that the sign pad changes the function of both players’ frogs, not just the one that lands on the pad. This was a “feature” that one of the players used strategically to his advantage. Both players agreed that this could be an interesting direction and weren’t sure which was better: my intended function, or the accidental “feature.”
Both players seemed to have slight difficulty in aiming for a specific lily pad. This could be helped by widening the angle of detection, or shortening the range of the frogs’ jumps. I’m leaning toward the second option as this would lead to other more interesting features like power-ups and the need for better planning on the part of the player.
Finally, I got a couple new ideas for power-ups. Reversing the opponent’s control scheme would be a funny one which would add to the already chaotic nature of the game. One player thought it would be great to have one that adds 50 to an opponent’s score. This would be interesting because there would be some instances in which this would benefit the other player and others in which it would hurt them. It’s always interesting when you have to think about when to use the power-up you’ve earned, which brings me to the last suggestion. The players thought it would be much more interesting to be able to save a single power-up and use it when the time is right.
Many of the issues that arose were things I had already thought of, but had not yet fixed or added, but there were some suggestions, like new power-ups, which I would not have thought of on my own. Overall, a successful first playtest.