Play Your Game As Your Users Will
I’ve been designing games for over a decade, and I always fall into the same trap:
I come up with a game design, and a list of things I need to do to implement that game. Then I focus so much on adding these features and testing them in isolation, that I forget to test the whole game.
I spent 10 minutes playtesting the new game today (testing it as a whole, not the little bit that I was working on), and came out of that short session with a list of 15 more to-dos, all of which will have a vastly more positive impact on the game than the tasks I added to my spreadsheet weeks ago that I was plowing through.
Sometimes, the issue is even more obvious. When I’m programming the game, I always run it in windowed mode, because then it’s easier to debug. But as soon as I switch to full-screen mode, I see little graphic glitches and artifacts that aren’t noticeable in windowed mode.
Play it the way the users will…
June 21st, 2006 at 7:17 am
Or get a horde of playtesters, but that is a bit more expensive.
June 21st, 2006 at 11:49 am
I won’t name any names here, but there seems to be an increasing silent epidemic of “spreadsheet checklist” developed games these days. They have the content promised, the features implemented, and the bugs sufficiently squashed, but have terrible overall play design.
It’s understandable that developers get tired of seeing the same material over the development cycle, but when I sit down with a new title and immediately feel like the developer didn’t even play it themselves, that’s really bad.
At the very least, developers must play test and tune their own stuff for good interface flow, feedback and rewards, and long term play dynamics.
Long live El Presidente!
September 25th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
I’ve been there too. It is easy to skip over the necessary in your rush to implement cool features.