📜 See all articles: Sitemap
⬅️ Previous Article: Milestones
➡️ Next Article: Building Industry Connections
Why playtest? Because your game needs feedback to grow. Show it to would-be fans every chance you get, earnestly listen to feedback, and make improvements. That's what elevates good games into masterpieces.
Imagine you’ve just taken over an old deli filled with bland, uninspired menu items. You want to convert the deli into your dream sandwich shop, and you’ll need all sorts of new ingredients and cooking equipment to do so. You have two options:
Design the whole menu upfront, buy every new ingredient, replace your cooking equipment, and complete the rebrand in full, all at once. See what people think.
Slowly roll out new menu items one at a time. Buy cooking equipment as needed, in order of importance. See what people think.
While the first option allows people to experience everything you’ve cooked up all at once, there’s a lot of risk to this approach. What if people don’t like your new sandwiches? What if they were great on paper, but the recipes don’t gel the way you expected? Have you wasted money on the wrong ingredients and cooking equipment? How hard will it be to correct your errors now that you’re this far into the rebrand?
You risk disaster with option 1, because you’re over-reliant on vision. You haven’t seen how your recipes translate from paper to reality. As importantly, you haven’t seen whether your customer likes your vision. You’re flying blind.
Option 2—while a longer and harder road—is safer. It acknowledges a simple truth about the creative process: it’s filled with revision. What works on paper doesn’t always work in practice. If you build a continuous feedback system, you systematize revision, preventing you from making the same mistake twice and improving your creative instincts.
As will be a shock to absolutely no one, the deli was actually a metaphor for your game. In option 1, you design your entire vertical slice, then ask people “what do you think?” In option 2, you design a new feature, playtest it, get feedback, and make adjustments.
Types of Playtests
The group you playtest with makes a massive difference. Let’s talk through a few examples.
Solo: in a solo playtest, you’re running through your (presumably singleplayer) game alone. This is essential work, and you should be doing it once a day at a minimum. In reality, you should be doing it multiple times a day. You need to play your game to see how the features you’ve designed translate from paper to engine. As the only person who knows your vision, you’re uniquely equipped to determine if a mechanic meets your standards. Be a tinkerer, and play with your creation.
Team: in a team playtest, you’re running through your (single or multiplayer) game as a team. You’re either taking turns playing it, playing side-by-side, or playing together. Each player knows the game, but they all interact with something they haven’t built themselves. In an ideal environment, you’re doing this daily.
Friends and family: they're often lousy critics, because they want to pump you up, but they still have the eyes of a new player. They can be of great help. Try to get them playing a build once per sprint.
Strangers: the final frontier, and the most nerve-wracking group to playtest with. This is how you really learn whether your game has merit. Playtest with strangers whenever possible (recognizing that this is a rare opportunity).
I want to give special attention to team playtests and talk through strategies to maximize their effectiveness. Shoutout to Fleur Marty for reinforcing the importance of these strategies. They are:
Have a theme for each playtest.
Time box each playtest.
Record all feedback.
Have a theme for each playtest
While all playtesting delivers value, unstructured playtesting can deliver unexpected and unlooked-for feedback. On one hand, this can be quite useful. It helps you understand your game’s roadblocks to enjoyment. If people don’t comment on your level design because they’re frustrated by lousy grapple mechanics, that’s a sign that you need to make improvements before people can properly critique what you’ve built.
On the other hand, unstructured feedback invites a lot of personal commentary. Playtesters tend to focus their feedback on what matters to them. One player will focus on sound balancing, and another will be critical of hitboxes. And while feedback in all forms is valuable, you’ll find personal feedback overwhelming, conflicting, and impossible to satisfy.
The most useful playtests focus on a specific feature or discipline. Some examples:
A sound-centric playtest, where players consider sound balancing, musical cues, and individual SFX.
A UI-focused playtest, where people consider the effectiveness and aesthetic of menus and HUD components.
A playtest specifically focused on driving mechanics.
These playtests allow for deep dives, and they create enough data points for you to take confident action. If four out of five playtesters say “the car’s throttle is awkward, and I don’t understand it,” you know you have a broad problem that you need to focus on.
Themed playtests also have the benefit of creating more impactful work. Sure, you could find yourself needing to do a complete overhaul of enemy behavior, which can be overwhelming to tackle. But it also pushes your game forward in a meaningful way. The alternative is three mid-sized changes to enemy behavior, two to sound design, four little UI tweaks, and an additional weapon. These little fixes solve downstream issues and can ignore systemic problems plaguing your game. Bigger revisions elevate your game considerably, and focused playtests make them happen.
Time box each playtest
While time boxing is valuable for any playtest, it’s particularly useful in a team environment. Consistency should be your goal with any team ritual; people enjoy getting into rhythms. Try to schedule an hour for playtesting. If that’s not possible, don’t settle for less than 30 minutes. You need to have time to mess around, and you need multiple playthroughs to test critiques.
Record all feedback
This is essential! You can’t keep permanent mental notes of every piece of feedback, especially over time. It’s vital that you record playtest feedback, even if you don’t immediately plan to act on it. That way you can return to past playtests and see if problems have persisted over time. Keep a “playtest log” folder wherever you store your Game Design Doc.
While playtesters help your game grow, it's often industry connections who help your studio grow. Read about forming them here: Building Industry Connections
📜 See all articles: Sitemap
Comments