How has Playtesting effected my game’s development?

Hi, today I will be discussing why playtesting is an important aspect of game development and how playtesting has affected my game.

Playtesting is the stage where a game developer tests a game for bugs and any design mishaps before releasing it to the public. Playtests can be run “open”, “closed”, “beta”, or otherwise. Open playtesting is usually open to anyone who wishes to participate, or it may involve game designers recruiting testers from outside (the public). Closed playtesting is done internally within the company and is a testing process not available to the public. Beta playtesting refers to the final stages of testing just prior to release of the product and is often run semi-open with a limited form of the game in order to find any last-minute problems.

Playtesting is an important part of game development since it provides the developers with useful feedback on some or all the functions of a game. Playtesters are usually the ones that will find any bugs that the developers didn’t think of testing for. Playtesting is also important since any developer busy developing the game will become too familiar with the gameplay and consequently won’t notice any bugs until it is too late. This does not mean that the developers are incapable of finding bugs, it’s just that it is more difficult for them.

Playtesting for us as student developers was performed internally and we have had Alpha and Beta playtesting so far. What i mean by the playtesting all done internally is that every group sets ups a couple of computers with the game on it and then everyone takes turns wondering around playing each other’s games. Of course, it wasn’t only first years wondering around since our second years (mainly our Scrum masters) had look and playtested are games as well. For more information on Scrum masters go see Scrum Masters. If you’d also like to know more about scrum and why we are using it for development, please see The Effects of Scrum on my Game’s Development.

Feedback for my game’s set up was done via Google forms. This was an easier platform to use since the playtesters, once satisfied that they have played the game enough, could simple press ALT + TAB to switch between the game and the questions posed on the google form.

Figure 1 shows some of the questions we posed to the playtesters

Figure 2 shows the types of responses we received during playtesting.

Now in terms of how the playtesting affected my groups’s game development, for the alpha we didnt really look at the results in detail since we already new what we were going to fix and what we were going to implement for the Beta. This in a way meant that it didnt affect my game’s development at all and could have had reperccusions later on. However, this was not the case for the Beta playtesting. I had a hand in analysing the results from the playtest and according to what was said, i updated our game’s balance to more suit what the players expected from our game. This was important because game balancing can be difficult to achieve and is an important aspect of a game’s development process.

During the beta playtesting where we could use more of the feedback, the playtesters mentioned the fact that the allies felt more like scapegoats instead of teammates. To fix this we added dialog that would shared between the allies and the player, basically visual feedback in times of crisis or when the allies wanted to help you with something. Another thing playtesters mentioned, that we changed was the shield on/off timer as they felt it took too long to use the shield again. This involved some game balancing and we took this information and used it to check other things in the game that could use more game balancing. This informaiton was probably the most useful feedback we had in during our game’s development process so far and made our game more interesting to play.

At the end of the playtesting though i did feel like my team didnt really use the playtesting results as much as we probably should have and it would have made our game a bit better. Which meant that playtesting results didn’t really affect my game’s development as much as talking to people while they played our game did. However, we did achieve quite good feedback on the controls of our game where they weren’t optimal enough for our gameplay and we were able to rectify that. We also received good feedback on the general aspects of the game and we were quite satisfied that our game had a good impact on the playtesters. So, keeping that in mind for the final version of our game we only need to implement the rest of the animations, proceed to debug and polish the rest of the game.