These Journals are part of my ongoing effort to document a first-time game designer bringing their first project to life. The whole process has been a huge learning experience and it’s good to look back on the progress made.
In the previous entry, I loosely explained our process of defining and creating the smallest possible thing that we could use to test and make changes to (our MVP).
To recap, we had identified:
- What made our game fun.
- The central mechanic of the game.
- The format in which we could release it.
The work I had done up to that point was mainly focused on writing the game book – the instructions and prompts. But, even though I understood how the game worked and what made it fun, that’s no guarantee anyone else will think it’s fun. Or even understand it, for that matter.
I needed to find some guinea-pigs and run some tests.
Test Round 1: Concept Testing
Initially, I wanted to test whether the game and its mechanic were fun or not. Essentially: Do I have a good game concept?
How do you test this? I decided to do what most people would probably do in the first instance – get a few friends to play it! This approach has advantages and disadvantages, however.
Advantages: Your friends will probably be nice to you (at least I hope they will!). Showing off a thing you’ve created (especially for the first time) is pretty daunting. With friends, I can at least feel assured that, even if my game sucked, they would break it to me gently.
Disadvantages: Your friends will probably be nice to you. People with friends who do improv or am-dram will understand. I’ve asked my friends to look at a creation that I’ve worked hard on and expect them to tell me honestly if it sucks or not. I know they’ll be nice, but will they be too nice.
In my case, as many of my friends are into TTRPG type games, and are the kinds of friends who have offered constructive criticism in the past, I felt confident they’d at the very least give some good notes I could work from. And they did!
What did I do?
- Walked the players through how to play the game.
- Tried to shut up and let them play.
- Answered any questions they had (and made a note of those questions).
- After the game, specifically asked them to tell me something they liked and didn’t like about the game.
- Asked if it was fun and, if so, why.
The rationale for walking them through the game was I didn’t want them to get lost and frustrated with the instructions I had written – the test was only about the core concept.
Being quiet and letting the player use the mechanic gave the player opportunities to meet obstacles and roadblocks on their own. When the player asked a question, it meant something wasn’t adequately explained so it needed to be included in the game instructions.
There are lots of ways to phrase the question “What do you like and don’t like about Thing X?”. Anecdotally, people seem to be generally more comfortable giving and receiving feedback when it’s phrased as a compliment followed by a critique. So I phrased the question in this way to let them know I was looking for critique as well as compliments and to allow them to phrase their response as such.
Regarding the fun factor, the why is much more important to me than the what. It can be difficult to articulate, but I lucked out with friends who do a lot of gaming and can describe how a mechanic makes them feel.
What would I do differently next time?
Get the game in front of strangers sooner to increase the chances of honest, unfiltered feedback. I have to say, this really depends on how thick-skinned I’m feeling. Which, for my very first game, I was not!
In future, reaching out to board game groups, sending to people I kind of know. Maybe not admitting to having made the game: “My friend has made a game, can we test it?” could all be ways to increase the honesty of the feedback.
Ultimately, I was lucky with my first round of testing, but I aimed to make up for it in the second round.
Testing Round 2: Playtests
Having made changes based on the first round of testing, the second round was more of a robust test. I wanted to know:
- Can someone pick up this game and learn to play without any help from me?
- Is the game’s concept and mechanic fun to play? (this question has persisted because of the shortcomings in Testing Round 1).
I managed to arrange a test of the game with a class of university students studying game design. This is mainly down to luck and networking. But the students were more or less a perfect group of people to test the new game. They were strangers, they knew about games and mechanics, and many of them fit the profiles for our target audience.
What I did
- Gave the player a copy of the game and asked them to play it. I did explain that I was testing the game and wanted to see if the instructions were clear. I also offered to answer any questions if necessary.
- Kept it impersonal. I used “We/Us” to talk about the company and distance myself as the creator of the game in the hope that it will make the play-testers more willing to offer criticism.
- Set up a survey on google forms to collect data and feedback anonymously.
This test showed that people could simply follow the instructions to play the game. There was varying levels of enthusiasm for the game itself with some testers being very excited about it and others not so much. This gave opportunities for me to find out why people liked or didn’t like the game.
What would do differently next time?
Bigger. More people, more data. If I had the time and energy, this would have been a good opportunity for me to reach out to other gaming groups and offer play testing. The format seemed to work well and the right questions were being answered. But more data would have been better.
Final Thoughts
Testing is integral to creating a good product, particularly if you’re trying to do something wild and apply Agile techniques to publishing.
The testing and iteration process is never truly over. Even with a finished final product such as a book, there’s always a future version of the game that feedback is useful for.
A product morphs over time and is improved by each iteration of it. As creators, our job is to welcome feedback, evaluate it, and, if necessary, act on it. A robust means of testing that is targeted to answer the right questions is key to shaping the right product, and create beautiful, games!
There's a Way Studios 