Playtesting can be an incredibly time consuming process in the name of improving a game. While shortcuts can technically be made it is much better to take it slowly and plan out how you want it to go. For us on Divining Rods that process involved a discussion about what we wanted to possibly move forward without having to do any major changes without reason. While it might not always seem immediately true, everyone on a team can contribute to things to focus on for a playtest.
On the art side of things, menus, environmental design and feedback or ‘juice’ of the visual variety can be some of the focuses of a playtest. For coders like myself it’s usually a test of how users utilize the systems we give them, or the always amusing stress testing. Watching how players, after mere minutes of testing, break the games I work on will always amuse and frustrate me. However, that information can be incredibly valuable. For one of our playtest phases a player found a bug that was never even in consideration for happening. (If the video works for you then keep the following sentence) The wacky bug in question is in the short video below.
(click the link above for the video)
The main thing to keep in mind when playtesting is the structure of it. Structure, both in what information you give the player, but also in how you track what happens matters. Say you are trying to test your onboarding for new players, otherwise known as the tutorial, you need to avoid giving the players any information related to it. Otherwise you ‘taint’, for lack of a better term, your results. By maintaining a rigid structure that was agreed upon beforehand, we at Divining Rods received data that accurately represented what players felt or how easily they learned with the tutorial.
Once data has been collected the last part to handle, to make sure that the result and all consequences of it are known, is analyzing the data. While we haven’t needed any large-scale data analysis yet due to the smaller nature of our playtests, looking for any trends or commonalities between playtesters helps to identify issues or strong points in favor of the current system. This analysis helps us to shape our game to be the best that it can be as we approach the end of our semester, and thus our development period.
-Quinn Kientop
Lead Programmer from the Divining Rods development team