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002 Playtests

What is Playtesting?

Wild Etchings Studio is back with another blog post covering our first game W1. Last time we covered project names, why they're important, and what our project name is. If you haven't read it yet you can find it here (link). This time we're going to cover playtests. Playtesting is where developers have a group of people play parts of their game to receive feedback that can be used to improve the game as a whole. This is different from bug/quality assurance testing where employees are playing through the game and validating that it functions as intended. Both of these types of tests are super important, but today's blog post will only focus on playtesting. My favorite playtest example is from a third person game that was getting feedback about it's controls. The number one piece of feedback from that playtest was about how triple clicking the player character to open their inventory was unintuitive and not very discoverable. At the time it made perfect sense to the developers that you opened your inventory that way because that's how it was always done and it had became general knowledge at the studio. That playtest showed that without the developers there to tell you what to do that this design did not make for a good player experience, was not easy to discover, and was hard to remember. This is an obvious example, but it hopefully goes to show how important and useful playtesting is.


W1's First Playtest

W1 had it's first playtest recently, this playtest was a small test that two friends of the company participated in. The goal of this playtest was to validate that the main mechanic of the game, having your bullets level up while in your gun, was interesting and fun to play. Both playtesters were brutally honest in their feedback which boiled down to two main issues.

  • The framing of the mechanic went against player expectations which made it difficult to understand what was going on and obfuscated what was expected of players.
  • After players understood what was asked of them they found that they had very little agency in what they were doing which they found to be boring and uninteresting.

Players did say that they could squint and see what we were going for and believed that the mechanic could be made interesting with some work.


What Next?

The feedback we received from this playtest wasn't what we hoped for, but was nonetheless very valuable as we can now make targeted changes that will make the game better in the long run. We're already working hard to remedy these issues by creating better tutorialization, modifying the presentation of the mechanic for better understanding, and providing more things to do in an attempt to increase player agency and expression. Let us know if this look behind the curtain was something you enjoyed and want to hear more about. Also, be sure to sign up for the newsletter if you haven't already as that is where we will let people know when we're going to do fan playtests. See you in the next blog.


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