asking questions to explore whether they have understood each aspect as intended, and using this to fine tune the design of each scenario or tutorial.


How long do they have to play? How long is it between sessions?). Time spent interviewing players of competitor games from your genre to uncover player’s context of play, and making sure your design team have a shared understanding of ‘who is playing our games’ will create alignment and avoid building a game that doesn’t fit real player behaviour.


2. Finding the fun with a vertical slice In ideation or pre-production, it’s common to build a representative sample of your game (the ‘vertical slice’) to test out the production process and anticipate the size of production. This also provides a valuable early opportunity to understand how your concept resonates with players, identify if building ‘more of the same’ will create a successful experience for players, and prioritise ‘what’s good’ and ‘what needs further iteration’, thus creating a roadmap for production. Reasonably informal one-to-one playtests, watching players interact naturally with the game, and asking some probing unbiased questions to understand what is resonating with them will give confidence in the direction and inspire production.


3. Onboarding players and ensuring comprehension during production When entering production team sizes ramp up and the majority of the content gets made. Each mechanic, feature or scenario has some implicit assumptions about what players will understand - does this tutorial teach them effectively, do players understand what they are meant to do, or where they are meant to go. To understand if players are experiencing these aspects


as intended leans into one-to-one observed playtests - sitting and watching people interact with your game,


4. Balance during beta and post-production When reaching post-production, there is much less scope to make significant changes. A lot of content exists, which would be too expensive to throw away. Additionally the quantity of content can make one-to-one playtests unfeasible, taking too much time to get people through the game. This pushes us towards quantitative methods, focused on polish and balance. Quantitative surveys, and getting a large number of


people to rate each level or encounter within a game will highlight where difficulty or pacing issues exist. This allows us to pinpoint where limited development attention can be focused, and tweak scenarios to improve the pacing or challenge and create a cohesive experience for players.


5. Launch is just the beginning Big pushes towards live service games, and free-to-play games have reduced the importance of a ‘big bang’ launch for games, and created the opportunity for further optimisation and improvements. Post-launch, telemetry (with the game automatically tracking player behaviour) becomes feasible to identify trends in where players are dropping off. Combining that with interviews or surveys of players will help give the ‘why’ to explain this churn - equipping your team with the knowledge they need to address problems and inspire future content updates.


MAKING PLAYTESTING FEASIBLE It can be hard to prioritise spending time with players in hectic game development schedules. This is made harder by logistical challenges - how do we find the right players, how do we avoid learning ‘obvious’ things we already knew, how to efficiently process playtest data, and how to turn it into actions, all while avoiding bias. Over our upcoming articles we’ll tackle some of the


biggest barriers that stop teams from running playtesting regularly, and unlock regular player insight for your team to inspire your team and help make games that players love.


Just some of the games Steve has contributed to


Steve Bromley runs playtests, and helps teams learn how to integrate user research into their development process at gamesuserresearch.com


October/November 2024 MCV/DEVELOP | 43


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