Play test, play test, play test...

Ultimately, there are two things you want to accomplish with your game: you want it to work, and you want it to be fun. And, there’s really only one way to find out if your game accomplishes these two things.

You have to play test.

I don’t mean just playing it a couple of times with your friends and calling it good. You have to play test it a lot, over and over again, with different kinds of people, and in different ways.

Play testing is really just the first step in the game refining process. After a play test, you need to evaluate what you saw. Who won the game? How did they win? How long did the game take? How was this play test different from other play tests? There are literally hundreds of questions you can ask about how a play test went, and it is your job as the game designer to figure out which of those questions are important for your game, and how the outcome of the play test should influence any changes you might need to make.

There are a lot of factors to consider when play testing. Some games play very differently depending on the number of players there are. Many games heavily favor players who are familiar with the game. You might be far enough along in your design process that you might want to find a group of people who have no experience with your game to do a blind play test, where they have to figure out how to play the game on their own without any guidance from you or anyone else who knows the game.

Now, a pitfall to watch out for: we spend so much time figuring out the rules and mechanics of our games, we sometimes overlook the single most important question: Is the game fun? It doesn’t matter how well the rules work, if the game isn’t fun, no one is going to want to play it. So, remember to check in with yourself, and try to get an honest read on how people are experiencing your game. Are you having fun? Are the play testers enjoying themselves? Sometimes, the most important thing you have to change is just to make the game more fun. I know doing that isn’t as easy as saying, and we’ll have to talk about this more at another time, but there are lots of ways to make a game more fun. It can be through the artwork, player interaction, theming, difficulty level, player choice, etc. Just remember, games are supposed to be fun, and play testing should be fun, too.

During the play testing process, people are going to have opinions about your game.  They are also going to have ideas about ways they think your game could be better, sometimes even before they’ve played it! They mean well, but remember to take these opinion and ideas with a grain of salt. These comments about your game are important; you want them. When you look at your play testers, you’re probably looking a the target audience for your game. Some of the comments will be really good, and you’ll definitely want to try them out, but at the end of the day, you know your game better than anyone else, and you simply can’t make every change and addition that someone suggests to you. This is one of the fastest ways to ruin your game. Ultimately, you are the one who decides what your game will be like. You understand the goals you have for your game, and whether or not it is reaching those goals.

After collecting all of this data, which includes your observations of the play test, as well as the opinions and ideas from your play testers, you’ll need to figure out if anything in your game needs to be changed. Once you’ve made those changes, or not made changes as the case may sometimes be, it’s time to play test again. I’ve found this repeated play testing to be a challenge, as I worry I am burning my friends out with my games, but do not be discouraged. If you have a halfway decent design, and if your play testers have any interest at all in gaming, being involved in helping a designer like this is actually quite fun. I’ve found that the people I ask are more than happy to give me a hand with play testing, and after a while, once your game is far enough along, they may start looking forward to playing the great game you’ve designed!

Here’s an example, from Rabbit Ranch again, about the importance of play testing.

 

The picture on the left is a hand of the old version of the cards. On the right is the new version. Notice the difference? In the old version, the card symbols are on the right side, so when you fan out the cards in your hand the way that most people do, you can’t see them. I had done dozens and dozens of play tests, and no one ever said anything about this. I think a lot of people just decided to hold the cards differently, or just spent more time looking through them and remembering what they had, but this was a simple design fix that someone finally mentioned during a play test, and I have to say the game design is much better for it.

Sometimes it seems like you will never finish play testing, and in a way you never will. Like many things in life, it is possible to continuously refine your game more and more and more, and still feel like it’s not perfect. It may never be perfect. But, you will eventually have to reach a point where you decide that it’s time to stop play testing, and it’s now time to introduce your game to the world. How you do this is a topic for another time, but only you will know when your game is ready to take that next step.

Well, that’s about it for now. Good luck, and good gaming!