FMP Blog Chapter 9 (Feedback Analysis/Adaptation to Feedback) - Open-World Level Design Showcase

My testing plan for reaching my testers was to share a zip file containing the Beta build of the project, along with a Google Forms Heuristics survey. I was able to get 20 play testers, with most of them being my friends from back home - the majority of whom play video games, as well as people who don't really play - my parents, sister, and uncles and aunties.

The first three questions ask for the testers’ gender, age range and experience with playing open-world games as I feel that these would be interesting factors to analyse and compare using the answers given and to better understand how the psychological and environmental aspects affect their actions and results.

For quantitative feedback, I opted to download and learn SPSS Statistics, which is a statistical software suite developed by SPSS Inc. in 1968, after which it was acquired by IBM in 2009 (Wikipedia, 2023). I imported the CSV data from the Google Forms survey and then was able to use the analyse function in SPSS to calculate the standard deviation, skewness, and kurtosis of the results. I unselected some other frequencies such as sum, minimum, maximum and range as these were not as pertinent to the analysis.

On reflection, using SPSS software as a method of analysing feedback was very helpful when compared to just using Google Forms as it has an analyse function of displaying the survey responses in various different visual ways, such as pie charts and bar graphs, as well as the ability to work out the mean, mode, median, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis. This saved a lot of time that I would otherwise have to devote to it myself, and as such I will certainly utilise SPSS again due to its usefulness.

Next, I adapted my open-world map to the feedback I received, and I practised a triaging system by prioritising feedback which had been mentioned the most frequently. Thus, this way the most commonly discerned areas for improvement could be dealt with.

For qualitative feedback, I used a thematic analysis method.

Please see the link attached for the heuristics survey analysis document: https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:737b04da-f182-36cd-9ead-df86aec2e288