Importance of playtesting
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One of the most important parts of working scrum or agile in general is iteration, and one of the most important parts of iteration is feedback. How else would you know what to change and re-iterate? This is where playtesting comes in. It is one of the most important aspects of making high quality games, games where every single feature just feels polished and well thought out. The playtesting settings we’ve had have provided our group with great feedback, not only in the form of suggestions or by finding bugs or other problems that we never even thought of, but also by having such a wide range of player skills we could see what kind of difficulty we actually had in our game, something that you can easily be blinded to when playing it yourself over and over. Another thing that is really helpful when watching other people play your game is that you can see what they understand quickly and what they don’t really get at all. This gives a clear idea of what we’ve managed to communicate clearly and what we need to go back to and re-design. We also had surveys that our players got to fill in after testing, though the answers were often very mixed and different players seemed to have vastly differing experiences while playing, probably due to previous experience with similar games and also personal taste. A problem with the playtesting sessions, however, was the amount of time between each session. Now, I do get that this game development course is on a rather tight deadline, but I heard from many groups that they barely had time to change anything between tests, making subsequent tests less effective. This was not really a big problem for our group. however, as we actually managed to change quite a bit between tests. As for playtesting outside of the designated playtesting sessions I’ve of course tried the game several times myself and we, as a group, held a playtest together during one of our earliest sprint reviews. This was both fun and helpful, though we stopped doing it, for some reason. I’ve also sent it to friends and family. I primarily sent it to friends that I’ve played games with before and who I have an estimated skill level of.  |