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!

Human Nature in Gaming

If you play games long enough, you’re eventually going to think, “I wonder if I could make a game?” Maybe you get this really cool idea that you’ve never seen done before, or paly a fun game and think, “I could make something like that!” Maybe there’s something about a game that just annoys you and you start thinking about all the ways you could make it better. Whatever the catalyst, now you have all these ideas swirling around in your head, but where do you start?

Hopefully, I can help you with that.

Welcome to my new blog for aspiring game designers! Every week, I am going to talk about some of the fundamentals of board game and card game design. If video games are more your speed, I encourage you to stick around, because a lot of what goes into designing tabletops games is going to apply to any game you make, and that includes video games.

Just a disclaimer, I am not a game design expert by any means, just a hobby game designer who’s happened to read a lot on the topic, and has been designing games for a long time.

This is mostly an introduction for the blog, but I am going to talk about the influence of human nature and game design in this post. My goal is to post once a week, with each post tackling a different aspect of game design.

So, if you get nothing else from this blog, if you never read another post ever again, I want you to take away one thing:

YOU CANNOT FIGHT HUMAN NATURE!

What this means is that as a game designer, you just have to accept the fact that people are prone to do and want certain things, and that is simply never going to change. Design with this concept in mind, and you will have a much easier time developing your game. Design against human nature, and you will be fighting a battle you cannot win.

Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures. If we see something done the exact same way 99 times, we are going to expect that 100^th time to turn out just the same. This is as true in life as is it is in games. If you design a game where at the beginning of each player’s turn, they draw a card, but on the fifth turn, they don’t draw a card, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that everyone is still going to try to draw a card on turn five. Every time you play this game, you are going to have to remind people that they are not supposed to draw a card on their fifth turn, and players will start having to repeat to themselves every time they play this game, “Don’t draw a card on turn five. Don’t draw a card on turn five. Don’t draw a card on turn five.”

And then, they’ll forget what turn they’re on.

Just don’t do it. Create the pattern; stick to the pattern. Your play testers will thank you for it.

If you must deviate from the standard rules of your game, make sure you are doing it for the right reasons. Rules that make sense are infinitely easier to remember and understand than rules that are arbitrary. People want things to make sense. We want cause and effect, we want an ordered world.

Here’s an example of how I had to deal with the issue of human nature in one of my games, Rabbit Ranch.

 

Some of the cards in Rabbit Ranch have purple stars on them, and some have yellow stars. The original concept was that some bunnies were male and some were female. When you played a female bunny next to a male bunny, or vice versa, you were allowed to immediately play another bunny. The idea, of course, was that the bunnies had a baby. I quickly became uncomfortable with this concept because I imagined parents across the country being forced into conversations with their children about how babies were made before they were ready to have those conversations, and it would be my fault because of this bunny game! So, I changed it from male bunnies and female bunnies to bunnies with purple and yellow stars.

The problem was, and this was a problem even before when we were still dealing with male and female bunnies, was that I had to constantly remind players that when you played a yellow star bunny next to a purple star bunny, the only bonus you got was the ability to play another bunny. You couldn’t play anything else. Now, this actually made sense when we were talking about male and female bunnies, but it made less sense when we were talking about purple and yellow stars. Also, the limitation wasn’t adding anything to the game, so I changed it. Now, when you played a purple star next to a yellow star, you could play anything you want.

But, that created a whole new problem. See, Rabbit Ranch is a pretty simple game. During your turn, you only have two options: you can draw a card, or play a card. That’s it. So now, whenever someone played a purple star next to a yellow star, I was constantly having to remind them that they were not allowed to draw a card, they could only play a card. It was human nature coming into the equation again. The ability to play another card felt so much like getting another turn, that in players’ minds, they did have another turn, and one of your options on your turn is to draw a card! Again, this limitation was not adding anything to the game, so again, I changed it.

In the current version of the game, when you play a purple star next to a yellow star you simply get another turn, and that is how the game stands today. The game is clean, and no one has be reminded of how anything works because I stopped fighting against the players’ natural inclination to do things in a certain way. Human nature is a beast, but if you can work with it, you will end up with a much better game.

So, that’s it for this week! I hope you all learned something that will help in your quest to making a game of your own!

Join me next time where we'll discuss the first steps in game design.