Earlier this week, in my capstone game development class, we started doing playtesting. It also happen to be the week that we focused on the interview process in this Design Research class. With the knowledge of qualitative interview methods fresh in my mind, I attempted to apply the methods for our play-test recruiting and testing. This helped in a lot of ways, but also generated some push-back from my team members not versed in interview methods. Also, I think I went a little overboard in trying to apply methods that didn’t fit the current state of the project.

For starters, I wanted to refine our screener email, to only ask for people that play games in the same genre as what are game is. However, given how hard it is to find volunteers for playtesting; it doesn’t make a lot of sense to deny participants entirely. Instead, we just made sure to include the tester’s genre preferences, so that we could cross reference their feedback.  For example, if a tester is a die-hard MMO fan, it would make sense to expect them to request RPG elements; and that’s something we would know better than to pursue as a feature. The other thing, is that the game is in a really primitive form, and so what we are testing isn’t really genre goals, but rather basic control issues and confusing interface problems. So even though it will be great to do more thorough screening and interviews, right now it doesn’t make sense to do.

The actual results of the playtests were really informative about our design choices. Some things worked out exactly as we expected them to, while other things were completely surprising. For example, the first interaction players have with the environment went almost exactly as we had done in our “mock-playthrough.” Almost verbatim, the testers interacted and said the things our dev team said while presenting what gameplay would be like; which was really encouraging to see. Other things were completely misinterpreted, such as our lighting effects. We had set up a specially lit area that had light casting shadows from behind a grating. It was included to add mood to the set-piece, but the testers interpreted it as an objective. They thought their goal was to get through the grating to the side the lights were on, and spent a long time trying to figure out a way to do so.

The dev team learned a lot about what the players expected to be able to do, and what they had fun doing. Although I feel like I have learned a lot from my formal game design education, I have a feeling that my education through playtester feedback is going to be a huge resource to really understand how to design a game.