23-26.02.2026 – Soul Keeper Development
On the leadup to our first public playtest at the end of week 5, we several sessions in which we worked together in our full teams to prepare our games for testing. I used this time collaborating with Misty to combine our two facets of development into one single program that could be run by players as a single, cohesive experience.
A more detailed overview is available in Development Log 04 – Implementing the Prototype, so put simply, the developments here mainly revolved around bug fixes and rewiring certain scene logic — actually getting the minigame to run in Misty’s build was relatively simple, despite our initial worries surrounding unity versions, as she was using version 2022.03.62f3 while my minigame prototype was built around ver. 6000.0.28f1; this proved to not be an issue.
There was a bug intially that turned all of the peacock textures and assets pink when running in-engine but after doing some quick research I realised this was due to the incorrect renderer being used: my project was built using the URP renderer while Misty’s was not.
After working together to rewire the game’s scene transitions, among adding an (albeit imperfect) exit button to the minigame to ensure that the player could resume the game after completing the minigame, we had managed to combine both our work into one combined project. Video below:
26.02.2026 – First Public Playtest
On Thursday 26th of February we held our first public playtest as a class, with several first and third year students also coming in to test some of our projects.
During this playtest I primarily took the role of gathering feedback from playtesters alongside Lettie. We kept track of questions, prevalent emotional responses, reactions to certain elements, compliments, moments of confusion and more.
Additionally we prepared some direct questions to ask the players to test their understanding of the prototype:
- What is the goal of the game?
- Thoughts on the minigame?
- Thoughts on the item system?
- Any other unrelated thoughts?
The feedback accumulated from the playtest is listed below, written mostly by myself and Lettie:
Furthermore, Misty later complied all of this feedback into a useful, digestible table format to help us decipher what to improve on in the coming weeks:
Despite a number of bugs present in our prototype, I think the playtest was very successful and a key insight into how people at large would recieve our game. The main positive feedback we recieved was that the game was very visually pleasing, and we quickly realised this as Soul Keeper’s main strength.
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