It is a well known and widely accepted thing amongst game designers that extensive playtesting is important. In fact even if you thought you already knew this, there's a fair chance that playtesting is more important than you think it is. But there's another aspect to playtesting which is less often discussed.
First, let's have a King Machine screenshot:
It's changed quite a bit since I last posted here. The actions available to the player have changed a bit and the interface to them has changed massively. Also, the player's robot now has cute little feet. That last is by far the least important change. But still… CUTE LITTLE FEET!
So here's the thing about playtesting: everyone knows you have to do some. Most people know the testers have to be people not on the design team. But what isn't nearly so widely recognised is that if you testers flag up a problem you have to fix it. Or more precisely, you have three options:
- Fix it.
- Decide not to fix it because different testers disagree over whether it's a problem or not.
- Ship a bad game.
Maybe you're laughing at option 3, but it's a lot more popular than you might think.
A big problem with playtesters is that they're often too polite. They say "I had some difficulties" when then mean "this stinks" or "perhaps it would be better if" when they mean "the current approach is beyond terrible". Fortunately there is a known fix for this problem: watch people play.
About five months ago, I spent some time watching people play King Machine as part of the UI redesign. What I learned was that the game was really annoying. Players mostly knew what they were trying to do quite quickly, then spent literally several minutes fighting with the game to let them do it. At the time I'd been thinking the game needed a better help system, but that wasn't really it. The problem was that even the redesigned UI was too fussy. It was very precise, but it was the bad kind of precise that forces you to care about exact control and play extremely patiently. Players seemed excited by what they could do in the game, but the act of doing it wasn't much fun.
What I did about this was simple: I rebuilt huge sections of the game. It took about six months, on top of the UI redesigns I'd already done.
The problem with this sort of thing is that it's enormously expensive (taking a long time), not very sexy (I haven't been blogging about the process for this reason) and if you get it right then nobody will ever notice. Which is why developers sometimes don't bother and just kid themselves that everything will be OK. But once the game releases, players are consistently unforgiving of bad designs.
Is King Machine's interface good now? Actually, despite all the rebuilding I still don't know. It's definitely a lot better, but more – hopefully minor – changes will likely be needed before it reaches its final form. Fortunately everything gets easier from here. I'll be blogging a bit more about the development now that it's mostly back to more interesting areas and in a couple of months or so there should be some kind of demo release so that people can finally get their hands on the game.
Not that this means the game is close to release yet. Feedback from more people is something I'm really looking forward to, but between then and release the aim is to refine the game further based on their comments. Because releasing bad games really isn't in anyone's interests.
