Games Testing

For this weeks reading we learned all about testing games and the importance of it as well as learning about criticism. Criticism can come in many forms, some can handle and accept it while others have problems taking constructive criticism.

This article explores criticism in all its forms and gives helpful advice on how to take it. Criticism can be very helpful and useful to those who accept it and use it to improve in their lives. Constructive criticism helps us to show each other where our strong points are and where we could improve. It's highly important to focus on being valid and giving unbiased feedback. It's also important not to let your personal opinion get in the way of the feedback. This article also makes a good point by stating three key things to include when giving feedback. These three things are to make your criticism clear, relevant and understandable. The article then ends by providing a list of tips for carrying out good criticism.

The other article named Level 11:Testing talked about the idea of play testing. It's always vital to be able to play test your own game while also allowing others to be able to play test it. From this we'll be able to know if our game is fully functional and provides us with useful information. This information will be very beneficial to our game.

Overall I found these articles to be very helpful and informative as they taught me a lot about giving and receiving criticism and also game testing and it's importance.

Testing
Image here

Links:
Game tester
TestBytes
Games Criticism

Alpha

For the duration of this week I've been trying hard to further develop my game with Unity and fix some problems that I had in the previous week. Firstly after a lot of trial and error I finally fixed the red scene. Last week my entire game magically turned itself red as I was applying a grass texture and I didn't know how to fix it so this week I focused on that and eventually solved it! My scene appears normal once more. 

I further developed my game this week by creating a variety of old style houses. As my game takes place in a town on an island I had to create a lot of these houses to compose a town type of setting. This took awhile as I've to make an entire town and add windows and doors to the houses. I also created a fog setting which I'm very happy about as I think it turned out very well and adds the creepy effect that I wanted my game to have. It took a while to perfect the fog and get it to the consistency that I wanted but I got there eventually and I'm happy with the outcome. I created more landscape too by adding shrubbery, bushes, creating a different variety of trees and another mountain range. My first person controller is now able to walk freely through the wisps of fog and collect gems. 

My plan now is to continue creating and finishing off my town with more houses and to try add in another sub-character or two. I'd also like to try and find how to create or add in streetlamps so I'll do my research on that this week and hopefully find an answer on how to do it. Below are screenshots of my progress, notice the red scene is fixed! 

My game