The importance of playtesting

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Testing game play in the Unity editor


Recently I realized how important it is to play test your game. I always thought of play testing as a thing a developer has to do every once in a while, but did not take play testing and all of its facets too serious. However, a play testing session that we had at university on Monday proved me wrong.

I didn't expect  a lot from the play testing. We prepared a few questions about our game, that we could ask the testers about. Some of the questions were about the play feeling of the game, others were about specific mechanics, music or the art style. Nevertheless, I was actually really confident with our game and did not really expect too much useful feedback, but more response on issues that we already know of.

However, when the play testing started, we already faced our first issues. As we never build our Unity project as an actual .exe file, there were a few things we have not tested out. When our testers started playing in full screen mode, the programmed mouse behavior was not working properly anymore and the player and other characters started going off the screen or did not move and follow the mouse at all. Additionally, when playing in windowed mode, the players accidentally moved out of the mouse onto desktop, windows explorer or opened a variety of other programs while trying to shoot the enemies in our game.
It was quite nice to see people trying our game out, even with those small drawbacks. Testers seemed to enjoy our games and all of the developers were very interested in seeing various reactions on implemented mechanics and game play elements. After the game play each tester filled out a form answering questions about different aspects of the game.

We did not just get feedback on known problems, but also got suggestions and opinions on other game elements, that we were not even thinking about. Additionally, testers helped us finding ways to break the game and making us aware of things that have to be fixed. There were some scenarios, that we didn't even think of ourselves.

All in all, play testing gave us as a group the opportunity to see the game from another persons perspective, find specific bugs in various resolutions and builds of the game and also added various suggestions and ideas of improvements and addition to the game. I learned that play testing is one of the most important steps to improve a game and eventually get to develop a great product.

Comments

  1. Kentaro Hayashida16 February 2018 at 16:56

    It was really fun to try out your game during the pre-alpha! You and your teammates have done a great job!

    This was me testing your game:
    ✲ﾟ｡✧٩(･ิᴗ･ิ๑)۶✲ﾟ｡✧

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  2. Booker26 February 2018 at 14:52

    The writer explains well for what reason his team thought the playtest would yield little to no useful results and also how that presumption lead to his team being sloppy when planning the playtest, at least when it comes to building the game in Unity. He then was positively surprised by the feedback he got, in the way that the feedback was actually very useful. The author describes the issues that his team didn't think about in detail and what they learned about these issues from player trying out their game and finding creative ways to break their game. The alpha playtest seems to have positively surprised their group in its usefulness, which is an experience my group has made as well. Overall I think this is a very well written Blog Post that describes the authors experience in depth and tells the reader what he and his group learned during from their mistakes.

    -- Matthias Jannidis

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