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 is 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 methods 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. There’s an article to help you pick the right method for your playtest at
gamesuserresearch.com, and we’ll cover this further in future articles here.
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.
Steve Bromley runs playtests and helps teams learn how to integrate user research into their development process at
gamesuserresearch.com
February/March 2025 MCV/DEVELOP | 39
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