I tested v5 with a few upcoming students and some fellow course members who hadn’t seen recent developments of Cogshel in a while. For those who had never seen my game before, I asked them to test the entire gameplay. I got a lot of comments on the art style again, with the majority mentioning that it was really cute and kid-friendly. The eat, sleep and play animations were particularly favoured. There were two bugs:

• The tiger would flip their sleep animation if the player clicked onto the left side of them. The feed, play animations also had this but it wasn’t recognisable as the frames were the same when flipped.
• The tiger slid around if their eat, sleep, play animation was playing and the player clicked a different area for them to move to.

I hope to resolve these movement bugs as a next step of development.

Players also found it difficult to avoid accidently going to the shop because sometimes a food icon would spawn onto the shop button, so I need to find a fix for this. I think I will just remove the button and make it background element, then get the scenes to change once the player reaches the edge of the screen.

The breathing activity was received well and players responded saying that it made them feel calm and relaxed.

One of the new testers stated that she loved the idea of looking after the tiger. Keeping it happy and looking after it was something she really wanted to do, simply because it looked cute and the act of nurturing an animal made her happy. This linked nicely to my initial research and supports my decision of using a pet simulator genre. She would’ve liked to see more customisation, such as personalising how they looked, but this is currently out of our scope.

Overall, this was another successful testing session that provided good feedback to improve the gameplay.

Playtesting WSA open day (2).mp4

Playtesting WSA open day (3).mp4

Playtesting WSA open day (4).mp4

Playtesting WSA open day (5).mp4

Playtesting WSA open day (1).mp4