Good Game Dev Habits Pt. II: Playtest Effectively

Playtest Effectively

Hello all,
This is the second of three posts in regards to good habits to practice as a game developer. The first in this brief series was titled Focus on Completion, and can be found here.

As I'm sure many of you are already aware, playtesting is, in its most basic form, the act of testing how a game plays before it is published in order to fix any flaws in a game before they become permanent. It is  a key component of game development. Playtesting helps smooth out any issues with user interface. Playtesting helps find and address imbalances that you previously may have not known were there. Playtesting helps to grow a core audience for your game, people who already feel connected to and invested in your game, even before it's launched.
In short, playtesting makes for a better game.

There are, however, ways to go about playtesting that yield better results than others.
When I began playtesting Portals: Worlds Collide, it was for the most part solo (that is, by myself and without other playtesters). I think this is a good way to find out the sort of game that you want to create in the beginning and iron out the details of the rules before showing the game to new play testers - but it's important to move past this stage instead of obsessing too much over it.
From there I playtesting with friends and family. As my game became more ironed out over the years (both through errors I noticed while playing myself as well as feedback from playtesters) and I became more confident in my game, I began branching out to running demos with more or less strangers. This was much better than the feedback allowed by people who knew me, as the playtest reports (more on that in a future post) were ultimately more honest and less toned down for the sake of not hurting feelings.

Giant Rooster doesn't care about your feelings.

Blind Playtest
An important step to seeing how your game is played by others is to run blind playtests. A blind playtest essentially just means a playtest where you, the designer and developer, don't go through or explain the rules to playtesters at all, you let the written rules do that for you.
This is important to do because when you act as the intercessor between the rules and the players, you're not learning how playtesters (and future players) interact with the rules, what information they're gleaming (or possibly missing) from it and how they're interpreting and playing out the rules that they see written before them.
Although blind playtests for my own games are certainly more brutal at times then the playtests that occurred earlier on in development (as I was no longer interceding as a living rulebook), they tend to reveal both more information and more flaws, and are therefore far more valuable than playtesting with a friend who didn't read the rules as you're there to explain everything to him.

Know Your Audience
When playtesting your game and sending it out to different groups to try it out and give you feedback, it's important to know who your game is for and make sure that for the most part, those are the people testing your game.
For example, my (compared to most boardgames) rules-heavy miniatures skirmish game did not receive good overall feedback when I brought it to Unpub, a convention where designers bring their in-development tabletop games to be tested out by strangers. The critiques received often centered around the fact that they themselves would never play a game that required keeping track of so many rules and different warriors to play (even with a reference sheet), as well as the fact that my game uses a ruler (standard in miniature wargames) instead of squares for movement as with many of the light miniature games that a lot of the attendees were familiar with, such as Zombicide and Mice & Mystics.

RVA Unpub 2015

In Closing
Playtesting is likely a topic that I'll revisit over time but for now the take away is this:
If you're working on a game that you ever want to be released to more than your family and friends, make sure to playtest your game in a way that shows whether or not your intended audience would be able to play the game without your help, just with the written rules laid out before them.
Also, make sure that your game is getting playtested by the same sort of people that it's intended to be played by post-release.

Until next time, happy gaming all!


Note - Unpub is a great convention overall. It's also free! If you're a game developer working on more 'traditional' tabletop games it can certainly provide a great testing ground for you to start vigorously playtesting your games at. It's just that if you're developing something that is generally more received by a particular niche audience (such as miniature wargamers) and not the tabletop gaming community at large, you should make sure to seek out communities to playtest your game who are a part of that particular niche audience.