INSPIRING CREATIVITY - HOW EARLY PLAYTESTING HELPED KEEP THE DEVELOPMENT OF DENSHATTACK! ON TRACK By Steve Bromley
B
y now you’ve probably seen Denshattack!, the trick-based 3D platformer, where trains trick through a colourful dystopian Japan. Pulling on
inspirations including Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi and Tony Hawk, the game released this year to critical success - currently sitting at an 88 on Metacritic. It’s immediately clear the game has a strong creative
vision - but creativity alone isn’t enough. The publishers Fireshine Games and the development team Undercoders understood that exposing their game to players early helped build confidence in their creative direction and inspire crucial early decisions that resonated throughout production. In this article we’ll share the inside story of running one of these early playtests, and lessons for combining playtests with your own strong creative vision.
INSPIRING PRODUCTION DECISIONS As Denshattack! approached an early vertical slice
milestone, the team knew they had to commit to what production would look like. During early development, Denshattack! had prototyped a variety of game modes, including races, score attacks and direct battles (and had a few last-minute ideas they wanted to test out) - and a steer on which of these were resonating best with players would help decide what the final campaign would look like. Like many trick-based games, Denshattack! also has a
high-skill ceiling - meaning the usability and teaching of the controls was essential - ensuring that expert players would be able to express their technical mastery of the game, while new players weren’t left out. This led the team to seek external playtesting, to validate the controls before level dependencies were built on top of them.
PLAYTESTING FOR SUCCESS This playtest would inspire high-stakes decisions, and so getting it right was essential. One element of this was clearly targeted recruitment - players were recruited because of their pre-existing experience and skill in competitor score-chasing games, such as Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, Jet Set Radio or Hi-Fi Rush - and it was validated that everyone regularly purchased games of a similar scope to Denshattack!. This ensured that the playtest data would represent the behaviour and opinions of the true intended audience and could be trusted to inspire production decisions. This playtest was also run in an external playtest lab,
which combined a secure environment (where the risk of leaks can be minimised), with a neutral setting - to avoid biasing players. Key members of the development team observed the test live, through the playtest lab’s
44 | MCV/DEVELOP September/October 2026
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