WHAT TO SHOW PLAYERS Successful concept testing requires getting your vision of what the game is into the player’s brain so they can react appropriately. Players’ imagination will fill any gaps (and probably not with the same thing you’re intending to build). We want to represent anything that doesn’t exist yet with something that best matches your design intent. Teams often have a lot of success using materials
from their pitch deck - a combination of a sizzle reel that has been put together for pitching (combining any prototype footage with relevant examples from other games or movies) with a one page pitch, and then deeper descriptions of each pillar for the game. Text is incredibly open to interpretation, so where-
ever possible supplementing it with images or video (including from other games) will help convey your vision to players as clearly as possible.
WHAT SHOULD YOU DO IN A CONCEPT TEST Remember, the data we can trust most is players’ past behaviour, so we should always be asking them to frame their answers based on what they have done before. Start the session with a discussion about their habits
with games from your competitor set. What have they purchased before and why? What have they liked and why? What have they disliked? This generates a lot of raw qualitative data that will help you channel your players better in the future.
Then we want to ‘show the thing’ - put them in front of
the one pager or sizzle reel. The most useful discussions we can have at this point are “what’s interesting about this idea’ and ‘what concerns do you have about this idea’. Following up on the concerns, with questions about ‘how has that influenced your behaviour with previous games’ will help you understand what concerns would put players off your game, the potential impact of that (has it stopped them buying or caused them to abandon games before). This will give you a list of concerns you’ll want to mitigate during development. Following this format with each of the core pillars of ‘what
games have done this well before for you, and why’ and ‘what games have done this poorly’, will further help your team’s decisions about how to implement the main pillars of their game concept.
A SMOOTHER DEVELOPMENT PROCESS Concept tests are challenging but extremely valuable - they are the earliest possible opportunity to start to understand how your players think, and improve your ability to anticipate player behaviour throughout development. Decisions made during the concept phase will have huge ramifications on the success of your game - and better decisions now will help further milestones land on scope and budget. Steve Bromley works with hundreds of studios and
publishers throughout their development lifecycle to run high quality behavioural playtests. Learn more at
gamesuserresearch.com
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