Studio 5 | Planning Your Key Assignment

Studio 5 | Planning Your Key Assignment

After reviewing the options for our key assignment, I have chosen Option 2 because I already have a keen interest in many games both newly released and I currently Beta test two games for Steam.

Report: Usability Evaluation of a Digital Game or Games

Choosing a framework: as an introduction I will discuss briefly Usability evaluations and analyse which framework to use when conducting my own evaluation. It is important that I take into account the fact that I am not a well funded games development house, therefore some frameworks may be impossible to follow strictly, but I will have to find the most suitable that best uses my assets. The framework I choose will also have to be relative to the game I choose to evaluate. A framework for a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game may be very different to a framework created to evaluate First Person Shooters. This means that before settling on a framework I must define the game I am going to evaluate.

The game I have chosen to evaluate is Team Fortress 2, a Half life 2 modification, recently released by Valve via Steam. The production has been going on for the last 8 years, so theoretically these guys must have tested this game beyond comprehension. Usability issues may be hard to find, but in a large scale distributed gaming network, problems and possible exploits are always going to prevail.

I will then define the testing and what is to occur in the usability evaluation, following on to a partially ranked list of problems, sorted by severity and colour coded.

Some of these problems will then be discussed in depth with the aid of screenshots. Accompanying these problems are ideas for possible solutions and possible adjustments that should have been made to the usability evaluation.