Preparing for game testing and making a Survey
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So the beta deadline is coming up and we have a playtest session before that. To get the most out of the playtest you must have a thought behind what you want the testers to test. To get the most value we have prepared a survey that the play tester can do after he /she played our game. Making surveys is a balancing act between not being too long so the tester doesn’t care at the end and just want to be done with it. Or to short so you don’t get the information you need. It’s also a balance between too strict and too loose with the same reasons. Having the survey to strict hinders the tester from really write what he/she thinks. Having it too loose can give you feedback on the wrong artefact in the game that you don’t really want tested since it’s not finalized. Or it gives the tester a feeling he or she must write something or just don’t bother doing it. Getting a good indication of people’s true gut reactions is crucial. Ask testers something like, ”On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the quality of your experience with this game overall?” before I asked them anything else, because you want that initial gut reaction I found it that If you ask people to analyse/justify their initial reaction, they often over-analyse things and give less accurate responses so leave it at that Having a field at the end of the survey were the tester can write freely is also important. You can name this “any other thoughts”. When they play the game they always find something that they want to bring up, but if it doesn’t fit your pre-decided questions. That feedback will get lost because of a poorly written survey.
Since this is the second playtest on this game we can narrow down on what we as game developers want feedback on. Since we got the feedback from the first test we know what people reacted to and we can now see if we have improved.
So to make this survey I looked at the feedback that we got from the last time and after having internal game testing with the group we all got opinions of the game. We then wrote down everything that we want to have answered by the testers on a whiteboard. All those questions made the survey to long so we had to prioritize and categorize the questions. After a discussion with the group we came up with 5 categorise with 2-3, 1-10 answers in each and a box to write freely in. Starting with the “overall feeling question” and then end with “other thoughts”
With the questions figured out its time to make the survey, in this case I used googles online survey. Now we wait to see what people think of our game.
Link to survey:
braindstormed questions catagorized. (sorry for the swenglish in the picture)
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