Week #5 – Using playtesting during development
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Iterative testing is a fundamental part of Agile methodology. When Agile is applied to games we end up with playtesting our games constantly, both internally within our teams, and externally in organized playtesting sessions with other students or dedicated testers. The main reasoning for testing early and often when developing games is to see if planned mechanics work as intended and deliver the intended reaction from the Player. Added benefits include detecting bugs, thematic issues, and seeing whether art assets fit together properly during gameplay. During our development playtesting has helped us uncover more bugs than we can count, severe design flaws and mismatching art assets. I shudder when I imagine a scenario where we would have taken an approach that only includes testing in the end of the project lifecycle. Thankfully the lesson to test often and early was rigorously drilled in early in the education and comes natural to all team members. More specifically, we have implemented a workflow where the programmers test their work locally to detect game-breaking bugs before pushing their changes to the current build. Our two artists will produce early sketches and regularly post updates on their work in progress so that possible flaws in art direction can be caught quickly and feedback can be supplied as to minimize amount of work that needs to be re-done. A benefit of having external playtesters is that the development team can quickly become blind to their own design. I now find it difficult to gauge the feeling of e.g. movement as I have playtested the game internally for quite some time and have become used to the movement behaving in a certain way. I also want to point out that the developers knows the controls and available mechanics of the game fully, without the need for a tutorial as they are the ones designing and writing the game. External playtesters do not suffer from this problem, and can point out important issues regarding how a Player learns controls, reacts to threats and navigates a level. This became obvious to us when we failed to include an in-game tutorial for the two playtesting session we took part in. The playtesters were utterly confused to the control scheme and most player died very quickly due to becoming overwhelmed by enemies too early and lacked possibility to adapt and learn how to defeat enemies effectively. To conclude playtesting is central to iterative game development and internal playtesting has proven invaluable to us when developing Aetherial, allowing us to detect issues early on. Thank you for reading! Anton Berglund  |