This month’s blog post is all about a VITAL ingredient needed to help ensure that your game becomes the best game it can be - GETTING FEEDBACK! While your QA team will surely be logging bugs along the way throughout development, it’s also essential to receive feedback from ‘fresh eyes’. This permits us to address issues before launch such as “Are the mechanics fun/easy to learn?” or "Is there anything game breaking that we’ve missed?”. To help you avoid making these issues, here are a few tips to help you get that early feedback you’ll need!
INVOLVE THE TEAM IN WEEKLY PLAYTESTS
Involving your team in frequent playtests as a part of the development schedule not only helps to provide the team with useful feedback, it also helps ensure that all departments know what state the game is in. It’s easy to work on your own specific tasks day after day and not realize how far the game has come in even just a weeks’ time.
Since NO LOVE LOST is a multiplayer, we normally boot up a session at the end of the week and chat about progress over a group call.
Make it a ritual! Pick a day and time during work hours where your team can get together and play.
Create incentive! Whether its leaderboard bragging rights or mini prizes, this always adds some spice to the routine!
Optimize the process! Use or build a tool that can gather ratings and detailed comments every playtest!
ORGANIZE A ‘FRIENDS & FAMILY’ PLAYTEST
Before NO LOVE LOST was announced publicly, we entrusted the help of close friends and family to provide key feedback early on. It’s important to make sure you have an array of different people on board: those who might already have some background knowledge in game design, as well as some casual gamers or people who align with your target audience.
Make sure to prepare an NDA (if there’s confidential info) and be clear with your feedback group on what to expect / what you need from them!
Create a place for discussion / questions that can also serve as a meeting place when the playtest is set to begin. A temporary Discord Server fits this purpose!
When watching people play, consider having the players record their screens! When focused, players may not speak much but by having the recorded session, you’ll be able to better understand what worked and where they may have gotten stuck.
Creating and iterating on a survey helps not only gather general feedback, but also lets us ask for specific comments on things we were still testing out.
BENEFITS OF DOING OPEN BETAS/EARLY ACCESS
Once we brought NO LOVE LOST to a desired state, we began promoting the game and made our announcements about its upcoming release. However, rather than releasing a demo or waiting until a specific date to release the full game, it was important to us to have the community involved in its ongoing development. This is why we decided on doing open monthly playtests!
By using STEAM’s playtesting feature you can create a different “branch” of your game for testing purposes. This enables you to:
Collect the community’s overall sentiment and vital feedback
Help strengthen the bond with your community
Let the community see how their comments are directly affecting development!
Rack up a list of suggestions the community would love to see in the game that you might not have considered yourself!
Grow your “wishlist” and spark discussion/interest with your growing community on what’s new and what’s upcoming!
As another option, STEAM’s Early Access feature is similar, in that it allows players to get their hands on the game before release, but the difference is they’ll be able to play whenever they want!
Whichever option you deem is best for your game, having this stream of steady feedback will help to weed out any bugs or problems you may have missed in your own sweep!
That wraps up this month’s blog post – we hope you found some inspiration from this and valuable ways to collect feedback for your own projects! If you’ve got comments, drop ‘em down below or continue the conversation on our Discord!