Hi I’m AceOfSpider of Buy Me A Drink First games and this week I’ll be continuing the previous topic of testing with how I run the play testing sessions of my latest game.

I am a developer, this you know of course but what you may not know about developers is that they don’t always see the perspective of the user, in this case the gamer. I add new content and make improvements to my game, and every time I do that I have to make sure that what I have done works, this means repeatedly testing the game myself manually. To speed this up I have made debug or dev tools within the game, for example walking fast, passing through walls, giving myself items or XP and control time slowing it down to check animations and speeding it up to bypass a long running process. This is all so I can get to the new stuff quickly and check it is ok. I know how to speed-run my game out of necessity and so I know intimately how everything works. So when you put a game out there and someone plays it, and they get stuck at the first hurdle, it’s obvious you missed something. This is why play testing is so important.

It’s not enough to just give your game to someone else and say hey can you play this and let me know what you think. You miss a lot of subtle things they either don’t mention or are not even conscious of. When my friends come over and with my gratitude are willing to play-test they are dropped in the deep end and I sit back with a note pad and pen. I don’t speak unless they have questions or have been stuck for too long. But getting stuck is the whole point, you will feel the urge to jump in with “Oh you need to press this button when you stand over here and then you can get that thing”, but you aren’t going to be there when everyone else plays your game, so this shows something you need to address. Aside from these note down the questions they ask you as this demonstrates potential confusion. Observe how they play and understand from non-verbal cues what makes them happy or annoyed, these are all hints to how a game makes a person feel.

You need to always welcome comments and suggestions from your testers but know that these are opinions, you don’t always have to go through with them if they are way off from what you are planning, always remember you are the designer of this digital world. However multiple people saying the same thing, that is different, that is a pattern and should be addressed unless vastly different from what you are going for.

I am extremely thankful to my friends and family have volunteered their time over and over again to help improve these projects. Without them these games would be very unwelcoming indeed. If I look back on the improvements that have come from the play-test session of 0.8 just in the last week, it caught players getting stuck on the environment, drops getting stuck walls, balancing of drop rates, it’s pretty much driven the UI improvements. It’s highlighted issues with the main quest line, improvements to sprite designs, accessibility of dialog and finally it’ s made sure that swamp rats no longer carry a wallet full of coins.

I am also fortunate to have a variety of testers, I have some that are developers as well who are great at finding bugs and testing mechanics, these are known as destructive testers who like to break things. I also have testers who are able to give feedback on the experience itself and who easily can point out from an alternative perspective where things are unclear and feel off in the design.

My play-testers are one of steps in the improvement of the games quality, but they are just as important as the build pipeline, automated testing and staging version testing. Once again I thank them for agreeing to me in forcing them to play the same game over and over again while I stare at them with a notepad in hand like a crazy nit-picking auditor.

Thanks for listening, see you in the next one.

~AceOfSpider