I recently wrote an article for MCV/Develop magazine, introducing some of the most important playtests to run throughout game development. In this email version, I’ve added some additional content to help teams work out ‘when we should playtest’. 

For as long as we’ve had games, we’ve had playtesting. Way back in the 1970’s, Atari was sending teams out into arcades to study the people playing their games. Ever since then, ‘seeing what players understand and like about our games’ is a crucial part of any development process.

But we don’t have infinite time and budget, and logistical challenges (like getting a build together) can make it difficult to prioritise regular playtesting throughout development. Despite this, the benefits of learning about how players are experiencing games are indisputable – surfacing problems early while still having time to react to them makes development less chaotic, prioritisation easier, and reduces the need for costly re-work.

The right mindset for playtesting

Playtesting, or any sort of user research activity, is intended to inspire decision making. You need to learn something about players to inspire or build internal confidence; a study is run and the team has the information it needs to move on.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating playtesting as a checkbox exercise – a thing to do because ‘we need to playtest’, rather than to inform decisions that need to be made. Always start planning any playtest with a discussion of ‘what decisions do we intend to make’, and ‘what do we need to know’, to check that you are in a position to act on what you learn. A lack of internal confidence about the game’s vision, what the most important things to work on are, or whether players will like the game are also common signs that a playtest might help provide clarity. 

Aligning playtests with development phases

Although we have to be careful about running playtests just because we’ve hit a development milestone, there is a benefit of mapping the type of playtest to your development stage – the type of questions you and your team will have changes throughout development, and this has an impact on what playtests should be run. 

I’ve written before about how to recognise when you’ve done enough playtesting, but as a starting point, here are five of the most important points to engage with players, to de-risk your game development:

1. Understanding players before we build things

During ideation and concept exploring, building an understanding of ‘who our players are’ will ensure problems are avoided later. Your marketing teams will likely be working on a player definition, but the characteristics they cover are often focused on purchase behaviour, rather than information that will inspire game design decisions. A player’s context creates constraints that need to be designed around (e.g. Will they have sound on? How long do they have to play? How long is it between sessions?). 

Time spent interviewing players of competitor games from your genre to uncover player’s context of play, and making sure your design team have a shared understanding of ‘who is playing our games’ will create alignment and avoid building a game that doesn’t fit real player behaviour. Learn more about running player interviews in this guide I created with PlaytestCloud.

2. Finding the fun with a vertical slice

In ideation or pre-production, it’s common to build a representative sample of your game (the ‘vertical slice’) to test out the production process and anticipate the size of production. With early prototypes, and with the vertical slice this also provides a valuable early opportunity to understand how your concept resonates with players, identify if building ‘more of the same’ will create a successful experience for players, and prioritise ‘what’s good’ and ‘what needs further iteration’, thus creating a roadmap for production. 

Reasonably informal one-to-one playtests, watching players interact naturally with the game, and asking some probing unbiased questions to understand what is resonating with them will give confidence in the direction and inspire production. This extract from my book How To Be A Games User Researcher gives an overview of how to moderate session.

3. Onboarding players and ensuring comprehension during production

When entering production team sizes ramp up and the majority of the content gets made. Each mechanic, feature or scenario has some implicit assumptions about what players will understand – does this tutorial teach them effectively, do players understand what they are meant to do, or where they are meant to go. 

To understand if players are experiencing these aspects as intended leans into one-to-one observed playtests – sitting and watching people interact with your game, asking questions to explore whether they have understood each aspect as intended, and using this to fine tune the design of each scenario or tutorial. This deep qualitative usability testing will help work out where players are getting confused or stuck, and inspire the priorities for iteration. This article introduces how to get unbiased data from player observation.

4. Balance during beta and post-production

When reaching post-production, there is much less scope to make significant changes. A lot of content exists, which would be too expensive to throw away. Additionally the quantity of content can make one-to-one playtests unfeasible, taking too much time to get people through the game. This pushes us towards quantitative methods, focused on polish and balance. 

Quantitative surveys, and getting a large number of people to rate each level or encounter within a game will highlight where difficulty or pacing issues exist. This allows us to pinpoint where limited development attention can be focused, and tweak scenarios to improve the pacing or challenge and create a cohesive experience for players. Here’s more information on designing surveys for players.

5. Launch is just the beginning

Big pushes towards live service games, and free-to-play games have reduced the importance of a ‘big bang’ launch for games, and created the opportunity for further optimisation and improvements. Post-launch, telemetry (with the game automatically tracking player behaviour) becomes feasible to identify trends in where players are dropping off. Combining that with interviews or surveys of players will help give the ‘why’ to explain this churn – equipping your team with the knowledge they need to address problems and inspire future content updates. I’ll be talking more about how best to optimise retention for your game soon.

Making playtesting feasible

It can be hard to prioritise spending time with players in hectic game development schedules. This is made harder by logistical challenges – how do we find the right players, how do we avoid learning ‘obvious’ things we already knew, how to efficiently process playtest data, and how to turn it into actions, all while avoiding bias. 
I’ve had over a decade of experience running all of the above studies, alongside training for teams on how to run these studies yourself. If you’re interested in learning more about applying it to your own game, do get in touch for a free initial consultation.