Indie developers will agree there’s no magic formula to raising money to fund projects. But for RibCage Games, playtesting acted as the hard proof to investors that its rhythm roguelite Alpha Nomos had attracted a credible audience even in its early stages of development.
“When you meet a person that says ‘yes, I have money to spend, I want to invest it, convince me to invest in you’, and you can show the data, then that is the best thing,” says Itamar Berner, co-founder and CEO of RibCage Games. “I can make a pretty pitch deck, I can show artistic merit, but if I have data to actually show you, that usually just hits the nail on the head.”
Early testing of Alpha Nomos showed encouraging data from players. According to RibCage, 51 percent of testers were keen to play more, and 48 percent were happy to make a purchase of Alpha Nomos after spending time with an early build.
You are not the market and the market is not you
For Berner this was validation of a potential audience. But also for the team at RibCage, because as much as you’re convinced you’re making the next big thing, your target audience isn’t game developers. “You are not the market and the market is not you,” he says. “Let’s be generous and say investors meet ten people every single day, and each of them thinks they’re going to rediscover America. If you go to investors and you don’t have market validation then you have a product but you don’t have a market.
“It’s really helped us when it comes to the business development side of things to realize that we actually have something to work with and we’re not wasting our time,” he adds. “You need to have it and do it early on – the moment that you have a minimum viable product. You do need to test it just to know if you are going to invest your efforts into something that will bear fruit, or if it’s fruitless and you need to change direction.”
REFINING THE MVP
User research hasn’t just helped RibCage fund the game, it’s helped shape Alpha Nomos on a fundamental gameplay level too.
“It really helped us develop what kind of game a rhythm action game actually is,” says Emil Lager, Tech Lead and co-founder of RibCage. “It’s hard to describe these changes on a proper scale, but we’re talking about control scheme changes, we had extra attack buttons, we used to have a controllable camera so you can just rotate the camera around in full 3D.
“One of the reasons that changed is that people had too much of a mental load. So we said, ‘okay it’s not that critical for the player to actually control the camera’. And to also have action game mechanics based on rhythm, players need to keep track of the beat, that is an entirely different story and more than seasoned gamers might handle.”
Taking away features, and with a stripped back view and simplified controls, the next improvement that came from playtesting focused on discovering in-game features that the development team assumed were obvious to the player.
“We have this really in-depth combo structure which is quite similar to Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, because that’s where we take our inspiration from,” details Lager. “And people really enjoyed the game without knowing about it. People were playing 40 minutes of the demo and they said they liked it and would actually either continue playing or buy it based on the demo.
“But at the end of these demos we asked them if you tried combos – did you try holding this button, or delaying this button press? And they said no. From the people who played this live, when we had proper recordings, there were two people who realised this was a thing.
“But most didn’t,” he reveals. “They just pressed the buttons and dodged the attacks.”
Once players had been shown the more in-depth combo tree, they went back and played more. “When they realized this they played around with it for at least 10 more minutes, just trying out the different variations,” says Lager. “So we know the tutorial needs to teach you a bunch of stuff better because this is a part that just went completely under the radar for players. Discovering that without [playtesting] wouldn’t have been as easy.”
Lager says that whenever he shows the game at public conferences, he has a tendency to explain too much. This casual live feedback might be useful to read player interest and tick off another wishlist, but it’s not as actionable as it would be using lab-based testing.
“If I’m at Gamescom and someone asks me, I will teach them how combos work. But I’m not going to be sitting there next to every single player who plays the game. So I need the game to teach them that this combo tree exists, it works this way, and you can experiment with it. We had to focus on communicating better,” he adds.
Those biases – you know your own game inside out – are something that you have to fight against when player testing, according to Berner. This is why RibGame teamed up with Games User Research once it had secured funding for Alpha Nomos.
“The creators’ bias is very dominant, especially when it comes to internal testing. It’s one of the reasons we wanted to outsource the game test,” he says. “Once you create something you feel like it’s going to be amazing because it’s yours. But it comes back to vital market validation – that’s the important part of doing it completely neutral without any internal biases. We needed somebody who’s going to give it distance from this product.”
“There isn’t a person alive that has played the game more than me,” adds Lager. “For me it’s trivial to get the timing right and on beat. But for someone else it’s going to be way too hard. That’s not professional enough when we’re doing it ourselves. Having someone professional that you know can distance themselves and do this very objectively was very much a boost to our understanding of the game as other players outside of the company would see it.”
Maintaining the design vision
You don’t have to lose sight of your dream game, but your vision is by definition blurry. Embrace using feedback
Feedback from playtesting can be difficult to take on board, and indies often think that it will somehow corrupt their grand vision, according to Lager. But for him the gradual feedback and taking action based on data is what makes the game better and improves the original concept.
“The first thing that I see indies struggle with is, they have a dream, they have this vision of the game,” he says.
“They say, ‘I have this idea, but I made it in some kind of minimal capacity, and I realized it’s just not fun’. Working on games should be a very iterative process. You do something, you try it. But because games are so dynamic, it’s really hard to say how a game will function when actually played – especially when you’re just trying to conceptualize it. This is a skill that we can get better at. It’s so hard to just think about an idea and decide if it’s fun or not.
“But once you’ve made it, I’ve seen a bunch of indies just be so steadfast in following that vision. ‘I made this game, I know what it needs to be, I know how it needs to function, and this is what I’m making’. They shut off all external feedback completely. This is a big issue. Indies should be accepting of external feedback regarding their dream game. You can still make the same game – but better – when you listen to feedback. You don’t have to lose sight of your dream game, but your vision is by definition blurry. Embrace using feedback to make a better game.
“Never abandon your vision because that’s what keeps you going,” he adds. “But be ready to change it if it’s going to make a better game. Even if you change something and you make a mistake, that’s better than just not trying to change anything at all.”
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