Playtesting and user research are tools for de-risking game development. By finding problems earlier, we are creating opportunities to pivot and address earlier (before changes get expensive and harder to implement).
However in practice, most teams don’t have infinite time or money for playtesting, and need to make pragmatic decisions about when to ‘spend’ their limited playtest budget.
In this article, we’ll look at how to make your own personalised roadmap for playtest studies, and work out the most efficient method and time to run your study.
Playtests should be mapped to production & design decisions
Playtesting data is only useful when it’s informing design decisions – such as ‘does this feel fun enough that we can build a full game around it’, ‘have we tuned the difficulty of this section appropriate’ or ‘is this tutorial good enough that we could move on?’.
To make the best use of playtesting means that we need to identify what are the most important (and risky) decisions we’ll make during development, and use that to inspire when and how we’ll playtest.
At a high level this will have some commonality between different games (e.g. in prototyping, we’re most likely to want to ‘find the fun’, core production is where most content gets evaluated for usability and we’ll end with balancing & pacing decisions much later in production or post production.) However each game is different (as will the experience and confidence of your team), meaning that your exact playtest priorities will need to be tuned to your game.

My recommendation is to prioritise playtests based on ‘player experience risk’ – identify what aspects of our game are a combination of important to the player and the team aren’t confident in the implementation. By identifying these points and being tactical with deploying playtests to mitigate them, you’ll create the best possible chance of running a confident production process that leads to a game players’ love.
To do that, we’re going to go through the following steps of identifying and defining those risks, and then working out when to tackle them.

Agree on the vision for your game
Creating games is a multidisciplinary process, and so we need to start with representatives of each discipline – start by getting your leads together to talk about ‘what are we trying to make’.
This works really well as a facilitated workshop, with a first step involving the creative director (and other people integral to defining the vision) sharing their perspective of what the game is, and jointly reviewing any documentation such as pitch-decks or concepts, so that everyone understands ‘what is it we’re trying to make’.
This stage is complete once all of the decision makers agree on ‘what is the game we’re trying to make’. Graham McAllister is doing some great work in this space, so keep an eye on his work for more on this.
Identify your biggest player experience risks
Once you have a clear understanding of ‘what are we trying to make’, the next step is to anticipate where it might all go wrong.
Still in a facilitated workshop, an approach I’ve found helpful for this is:
- Brainstorm the biggest risks (a prompt I’ve found helps is ‘imagine our game gets a metacritic score of 68% on launch. What went wrong?).
- Prioritise those risks based on the group’s perception of ‘how likely are these risks to occur’.
Then review your constraints (how much budget do you have for playtests, how much do your playtests typically cost), and work out how many of the high priority risks you can afford to run playtests to de-risk.
This has generated your list of potential topics to playtest.
Define your biggest player development risks
For each of your biggest risks, we now need to shape them so they are useful for scoping the objectives and method for your playtests.
This is still recommended as a collaborative activity to do with all of your leads, as each discipline will bring their own lens and understanding to the subject.
Take each of your top risks in turn, discuss, and agree the answers to the following questions for them:
- What do we need to learn from players to de-risk this?
- What decisions will we make as a result of learning this?
- What needs to exist for us to test this?
- How will we know when we’ve answered this?
If physically together, this can be done by creating and filling out templates for each player experience risk – or can be run remotely on collaborative whiteboard software like Miro.
Match your risks to your production timeline
Once you’ve got your list of player experience risks defined, take each and map it to your game production timeline. Each risk will have pre-requisites (e.g. you’ll need an inventory system to exist before you can test player’s understanding of their inventory), and have a time when it’s too late to run (when your team can no longer accommodate changes to how the inventory works).
Take your production timeline, and for each risk discuss:
- When is the earliest we can run a playtest to address this
- When is the latest we can accommodate changes
Then make your best guess as a team where you think this playtest needs to run – once again, this works great as an in-person workshop (it’s like ‘pin the tail on the donkey’)
When doing this it might become clear that multiple of your risks can be tackled by the same study – combine them if so.
There are many methods that can be used for playtesting – including surveys, 1:1 observation of players, or bringing a lot of players to play simultaneously in a lab setting (multi-seat testing). Each method has different strengths (either leaning more towards measurement, or a qualitative understanding of player’s behaviour and opinions), and you should use your definition of ‘What do we need to learn from players to de-risk this’ for each playtest to inform your choice. My article on choosing the right playtest method might help here, as will the free book ‘playtest plus’.
Integrate player insight throughout development
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Plus your free early-access copy of ‘Playtest Plus’ – the essential guide to the most impactful playtests to run throughout development of your game

Your playtest roadmap is a living document
Game development is not a linear process, and your game production plan will change as new priorities or issues emerge. This means our playtest roadmap also needs to change, rather than being blindly followed. I’d recommend implementing a regular review process – every quarter reflecting on your playtest roadmap, and running a smaller version of this process, to make sure that your playtests continue to reflect your top development priorities.

This can also impact how you decide to document your roadmap – I’d recommend a flexible project management tool such as Trello, or integrating it into your existing production toolset, rather than creating a static PDF (which will likely be lost and forgotten about)
Building confidence throughout game production
By running this process, you’ll be getting the right data at the right time to de-risk your game development process. As mentioned, this works best as a facilitated workshop with all of your leads involved, so that everyone is bought into the process.
Creating your first iteration of a playtest roadmap as soon as possible is essential (it’s an early pre-production task). Identifying the most important player experience risks will help avoid early decisions accidentally boxing in later choices, and help you achieve a smooth and confident production process.