Game Design 1. Week 3: September 20, Playtesting: the triumph and the terror. Fall 2016 Tuesdays & Thursdays 9:30 AM-12:15 PM

Transcription

1 Week 3: September 20, 2015 Game Design 1 Playtesting: the triumph and the terror Fall 2016 Tuesdays & Thursdays 9:30 AM-12:15 PM Instructor: Naomi Clark nmc5@nyu.edu / naomi@halfrobot.com Teaching Assistant: Zach Barash zb450@nyu.edu

2 Week 3: September 20, 2016 Game Design 1 Playtesting: the triumph and the terror Fall 2016 Tuesdays & Thursdays 2:00 PM-4:45 PM Instructor: Naomi Clark nmc5@nyu.edu / naomi@halfrobot.com Teaching Assistant: Hannah Monck hnm247@nyu.edu

3 Game Design 1: Week 3 Today s Class Iteration, Playtesting, and Creativity Guidelines for playtesting Kinds of playtesting When to playtest The nitty-gritty: playtesting your current projects! Recapping a playtest Abstract Game: next steps

4 Problem-Driven Design FUN: incredibly vague, subjective; maybe keeps you from wandering in the wrong direction if you can spot lack of fun? HOMAGE: Okay. A starting point? But what to do next? INNOVATION: not good enough on its own; there are countless possible mutations for the sake of being distinctive MONEY: how? What problem have you solved, what are you bringing that people need, etc?

5 Problem-Driven Design

6 First-Order Design LOGOS MAGAZINE COVERS ALBUM COVERS Daredevil by Sherman Alexie On her birthday, in 1963, POETRY My aunt and her friends drank antifreeze. Fourteen teenage Indians died that night. My aunt survived but she soon went blind. And though she's no masked superhero,

7 Second-Order Design STAGE PLAYS PLAYGROUNDS NIGHTCLUBS SYMPHONY SCORES

8 Stages of Creativity (Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi) Not necessarily in this order! ITERATION RAPID NEXT BUILD PROTOTYPING Preparation Immerse yourself in, research and study a topic Incubation Time to think about the topic at a semiconscious level Insight Seeing how it comes together Evaluation Will it work? (Outside input often helpful to avoid distorted reflections.) Elaboration Actual work of making things. (The 99% perspiration.)

9 Playtesting

10 Playtesting Playtesting is for MASOCHISTS. It is SO PAINFUL but SO REWARDING the hell of people HATING your game NOT GETTING IT or the WORST: JUST NOT CARING AT ALL. But one day the tiniest change you made will make all the difference and players will just GET IT and you'll want to cry tears of joy. Don't do too much playtesting at once. IT will kill you. Chelsea Howe -- Creative Director, EA Mobile + Independent Developer (FarmVille, Alone in the Light, Tiny Castle, The End of Us)

11 Over and over and over. Yes: over and over and over! Iterative Process: This is how a game evolves (assuming you want it to)

12 Reasons for the one-way mirror The Observer Effect The Freaking Out, Swearing and Screaming Effect

13 What playtesting is not It s not focus testing. Even though some professional companies do both. Playtesting is about watching and listening to someone s experience, not just their opinion and likes/dislikes. It s not QA testing. Common point of confusion: playtesting isn t done primarily to find bugs, although sometimes you do spot them in the process. QA Testers are professionals doing a boring job. Playtesters are there hopefully to have fun or have an audience experience. It s not a presentation. Although getting to a moment where a game is playtested is often an important milestone, it shouldn t really be a show-off moment to impress others, or even primarily to entertain playtesters. If they re not having a good time, you want to find that out. It s not only usability testing. Although finding out what aspects of a game are confusing or that players can t figure out how to work is important, usability testing is focused on functional software not on experiences that we might want to be frustrating or perplexing.

14 Asking developers: when do you start playtesting? Playtest before you think you are ready. Is it too early for you to playtest? If the answer is yes, then playtest anyway. Eric Zimmerman & Nathalie Pozzi (Sixteen Tons, Interference) from The Rules of Playtesting (unpublished) Don't playtest very early on. You can but I don't get a lot from it. Early controls or programmer visuals or being a toy instead of a game tend to throw people off. They'll comment on superficial items or get hung up. Dan Cook (Triple Town, Leap Day) At a stage 75% of the way between idea in my head and alpha. We really need a name for that. Robert Yang (Radiator, Souvenir) For Osmos, we waited until the controls felt close to finished. Shoddy controls break the feel of an otherwise potentially great game. Andy Nealen (Osmos)

15 Time-slice testing with Dan everything can be scienced Cook EXPERIENTIAL TARGETS 30-seconds of fun 5 minutes of fun 15 minutes of fun 30 minutes of fun 1 hour of fun 2 days of fun Almost all internal tests with development team May be more like toys than games Start bringing in external players Look for intuitive learnability (no tutorial) Look for unexpected opportunities: skill, interesting dynamics Living tests after this point, with the same player population over time (longitudinal)

16 When to playtest? A game doesn t have to be anywhere close to done to playtest. It can be raw, broken, a first draft, a rough idea as long as it can be played. To start playtesting, you only need to have questions about the playtest build of your game that can be answered (at least partly) by playtesting. This can even be the basic question: is this game fun? But there are other less generic / vague / subjective questions too.

17 Kinds of questions To start playtesting, you just have to be able to ask questions about the playtest build of your game. Is this a good/fun game? (can only really be asked at the end?) Do players have an idea of what they need to do to win? Is this section too hard? Too easy? Did they get confused? Was it funny when an opponent got crushed? Did they laugh? Does the last phase of the game take too long to wrap up? Did the 2nd level teach the player how to deal with flying enemies? Who do players think the main character is supposed to be?

18 Categories of Playtester Don t blame them corollary: you pick them! Yourself and Your Team: yeah, kick the tires first. If you can answer questions yourself, you can move on to harder Q s! Other Game Developers: can be useful early on, but often give you well I would do it this way suggestions Friends and Family: often available, easy to ask, not scary, but too nice Intended Audience Tester: Finding people who like this kind of game, or are part of the target audience. Very valuable. Often in online communities! Kleenex Tester: one-time testers useful for getting enough does this make sense and is the beginning the right difficult results the things you can t unsee once seen; use many and don t reuse. Benchmark, Living, or Longitudinal Tester: a tester you come back to over and over again to evaluate how your changes are affecting the game Uber or Style Tester: a benchmark tester who s gotten very good, useful for understanding the upper limits, or how certain playstyles are affected

19 The right people for the game? The iphone version was supposed to be something with more mass appeal, so I found people who "weren't gamers" to play. If I couldn't get them to give the iphone back, then that meant I was on the right track. Andi McClure (JumpMan, Markov Space) Test with children, but don't necessarily listen to everything they're saying. We had one boy who said, oh, this [world] is clearly in a girl's head. That interested us because we didn't make it very clearly feminine or anything. Why would he say that? Because everything is so messed up. We gave him the side-eye and moved on. Robert Yang (Radiator, Souvenir)

20 Categories of Playtester Always thank playtesters for their time! Yourself and Your Team: yeah, kick the tires first. If you can answer questions yourself, you can move on to harder Q s! Other Game Developers: can be useful early on, but often give you well I would do it this way suggestions Friends and Family: often available, easy to ask, not scary, but too nice Intended Audience Tester: Finding people who like this kind of game, or are part of the target audience. Very valuable. Often in online communities! Kleenex Tester: one-time testers useful for getting enough does this make sense and is the beginning the right difficult results the things you can t unsee once seen; use many and don t reuse. Benchmark, Living, or Longitudinal Tester: a tester you come back to over and over again to evaluate how your changes are affecting the game Uber or Style Tester: a benchmark tester who s gotten very good, useful for understanding the upper limits, or how certain playstyles are affected

21 Categories of Playtester: When to playtest

22 Frustration might not be the real enemy Don't interpret player frustration as a design failure. IT'S OKAY IF SOMEONE GETS STUCK FOR A WHILE. You don't see what's going on inside their head, so what's really going on might not be as static as it looks. IT'S OKAY IF SOMEONE GIVES UP. They might come back later; if something's hard you shouldn't expect a player to get through it in a single session. IT'S OKAY IF SOMEONE NEVER GETS THROUGH AT ALL. A game doesn't have to work for everyone. Michael Brough (Glitch Tank, 868-HACK)

23 Thinking Aloud: Getting the Thought Bubble into the Speech Bubble MOST USEFUL What they re looking at / paying attention to / concerned with at the moment Concurrent Think-Aloud Helps spot & underline problems Multitasking, self-censorship & slow-down Retrospective Think-Aloud Keep talking VS. What were you just thinking? Goes deeper, helps clarify & elucidate Takes more time, relies on memory of not knowing The occurrence a feeling or reaction ( I m bored right now. ) General stream of consciousness ( Huh, I wonder if no, maybe over here ) Explaining the root cause of a feeling or reaction ( I m bored because X, Y, Z ) Opinions about how to address problems LEAST USEFUL

24 Constructing a Playtest 1. Introductions: especially any problems are not your fault, we want to know! 2. Pre-Interview: getting information that will help you understand observations and the differences between multiple playtesters. 3. Play and Observe: think-aloud, don t talk, record observations 4. Post-Interview: - getting additional verbal feedback about your questions (can pre-prepare) - understanding what you observed better (can t pre-prepare) - answer questions with questions, even here - avoid leading questions or biasing playtesters towards pleasing you

25 Time for Playtesting: but first, guidelines Designers: Introduce your game: title and elevator pitch (~10 seconds) Hand over the rules. Do not speak after this! Only observe, listen, watch, take notes. unless a situation are OFF THE RAILS. Play can t proceed, or the game they re playing bears little to no resemblance to yours. One misinterpretation of the rules is not OFF THE RAILS see how it plays out. Don t interrupt to correct at all, unless it s totally dire. Do not wince, gasp, make faces. You don t have to be robots, but don t be conspicuous. Watch players faces and reactions and listen to what they re saying, watch their plays. While taking notes, write up questions you want to ask afterwards to help understand players thoughts, reactions, their impressions and feelings about the game. Players: Talk while you re playing and figuring out how to play. Pretend you re not being observed. You don t have to give away your moves, but otherwise: stream of consciousness Be unflinchingly honest! Honest critique is a sign of respect. Just being nice isn t as valuable.

26 Playtesting Recap Get together with your group and discuss what you just observed! What are the problems you noticed? What s happening that you like even if unexpected? Do you have ideas on what steps to take next? Propose them, discuss briefly. No need to pick a course of action yet. Take notes legibly you will have to hand these in (and they will be given back) Preferably on paper, if possible

27 Sometimes, the course of playtesting and iteration The unexpected happens. Uncertainty is part of (many) games and almost all game design In professional work, whether as an employee or on a contract Your role changes You leave one project to start something new or inherit someone else s problem NOW: Swap games. The game you playtested is now your own. Hand over your rules, notes on changes! You re passing them down to your inheritors. Your grade for this project will be based on your former game, as it exists today + the changes you make to your new game