Keybattle Royale Playtest

Playtesting/Feedback: Our first official playtest of Keybattle Royale went surprisingly well in some aspects but at the same time very problematic in others. As for positive notes, all of the players seemed engaged and fairly invested in the game throughout the playtest. As we had hoped, our game created a very competitive environment that already had people attempting to use multiple strategies to succeed. The learning curve for picking up the chat log movement syntax seemed relatively low as players caught on around 2-3 rounds in. However, issues began to arise after the first looting phase concluded. A couple players had bad luck with the random loot generator and one was even left with only one type of item. As one of our playtesters noted, that round the loot generator essentially acted as a random loser generator. As expected, the player with only one type of loot item was swiftly knocked out of the game once they entered the dueling phase which forced us to see the importance of making sure each player has at least two unique items to fight with. Another issue we ran into was that the rate in which the board's boundaries shrunk was too fast to allow for evasive strategies. While having boundaries shrink every round forced combat and excitement, at the same it completely prevented a different type of game play to take place. Players with less item variety/stock also voiced that they wished there was another action they could take to increase their chances of winning. Some suggested we implement a terrain blocking system that players could use to either force combat between people or force players to be eaten up by the shrinking boundaries. In this case, even players who would not win in head to head duels still have a fighting chance of ending up last player standing, thus balancing the entire game.

Gameplay from playtest:

Game board from playtest:

Post playtest discussion: