BUILDING
YOUR PLAYTEST ROADMAP
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Finding problems earlier in the game dev cycle can save both time and money — Steve Bromley explains how to make sure your playtesting roadmap is an efficient one
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laytesting and user research is a tool 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 appropriately’ 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 and 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 where 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.
IDENTIFY YOUR BIGGEST PLAYER EXPERIENCE RISKS Creating games is a multidisciplinary process, and so we need to start with representatives of each discipline - start by getting your leads together to identify the biggest risks to the game. This works really well as a facilitated workshop, following
an agenda of: • Share background and context to develop a shared vision of what we’re making
• 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’.
38 | MCV/DEVELOP February/March 2025
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