Congratulations, you have moved your
rules from a Concept, the
4Ms, your Initiative
mechanics, and put together some profiles and chrome.
You have come a long way and are ready to play your game! Now comes
the hard part, seeing if your game actually works at all the way you
intended it to work! To find out there is only one way to figure it
out.... you have to play.
Typically, there
are a few phases of playtesting. Each stage of playtesting builds
off the previous level. Through playtesting you are looking to find
out the following things:
- Do your core mechanics actually work?
- Are the rules clear?
- Do your rules have blindspots?
- What is unnecessary bloat?
- Does the game play like you wanted?
As you playtest,
you need to be ready to be ruthless. Now is the time where you MUST
be ready to “kill your babies”. What does this mean? You must
be willing to discard the mechanics you have built so far and go back
and start again. This is very, very hard. However, to fail here is
to fail your game.
Keep your Design
Goals handy. It will be tempting to go into every detail or do
something completely unique for each scenario. The Design Goals will
keep you grounded and avoid going off the rails. It does you no good
if during this stage, you “Kill you babies” but go so far outside
of your design goals that the game is no longer what you wanted to
accomplish.
Level 1- Just and some Paper
You will probably
be doing this as you go, but I wanted to make it explicit. Here you
sit down, and just walk through the game in the abstract. You make
sure you covered all the 4Ms, that you know how to and when to
activate, that you know how to get a result, that you know when the
game ends. At this stage, you may grab some dice, calculator or a
probability chart and work through each stage looking for gaps you
missed or things that are not clear or covered in the rules. This
will make sure you covered most of your gaps and nothing glaring is
missing.
Some people design
Use Cases to test, build programs to run probabilities, or other
elaborate steps. It is up to you how rigorous you want or need to
be. I will caution you. Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the
good. A game that never gets finished and played is no good to
anyone. An imperfect game is better than the game that is never
played. Let your creation eventually hit the table.
Level 2- Just You and the Table
You
should begin your playtesting very simply. No one knows the rules of
the game better than you. So put some templates
on the table and start playing. Run through a very basic game with
no complications. Take copious notes as you do this. The whole
point is to find places where the rules do not work.
As you hammer out
the details keep playing. If you want keep adding a few
complications or modify the scenario. You want to make sure you
hammer out all the obvious things you can find on your own
play-through.
At
this stage, you need to be willing to go back to the drawing board
are start all over again. It isn't easy, but if something doesn't
work, it doesn't work. Once you are done with this stage, all the
obvious problems should be hammered out and the game should play
smoothly.
Level 3- You and your Buddy
You have hammered
out all the obvious issues in playtesting with yourself, at least the
issues obvious to you. Now, you need to give your rules to some of
your preferred opponents. Set-up a evening of gaming or two and let
them read the rules on their own before the day of the game.
Ideally, they will help you find editing issues but you are really
looking for what questions they bring about the rules before the
game. These are areas that need to be tweaked and explained better.
Once you get
together you can play. Try to not give a tutorial or major
explanations of the rules. You gave them a copy, so start playing.
Again, as you play take careful note of where you find gaps, your
opponent asks questions, and what strategies your opponent used.
These insights allow you to see not only if the game works, but does
it work AS INTENDED. i.e. do the rules lead to the conclusions you
wanted?
If possible, go
back and make tweaks; and come back to your buddies with the updates.
Let them read the updates and ask questions. Take note of what they
are asking and what conclusions they come to from reading the rules
as written. This will guide you to streamline and clarify.
If you game does
not play the way you intended it you need to go back and re-balance
incentives your game puts on actions to naturally apply to the way
you want the game played. Again, be ready to “kill your babies”
because the game is not doing what you wanted it to do. Refer to
your Design Goals to stay on track.
From Wikimedia Commons |
Level 4- Gamer vs. Gamer
At this stage, the
rules are ready to be given to a group of players without your
guidance. Instead, you give them the rules, they read the rules, and
then they play games. You make this as structured as you like. Some
designers provide briefings and test cases for what scenarios need to
be tested, some gather detailed data through observation or after
action reports, some use 5 point scale surveys, while others just
solicit ad-hoc feedback. The process is up to you, but typically the
more rigorous the testing the more rigorous and specific the output
from your testers.
Your testers will
have plenty of ideas and thoughts about what you should or should not
do with the game. Keep in mind they do not have the perspective on
the Design Goals and what the game is intended to do. Only you do.
At this point, the hardest part is balancing the feedback with the
Design Goals. Therefore, not everything a playtester says should
immediately become the truth.
It is very easy
for a designer to fixate on a single pain point from one player and
overlook the positive feedback on the exact same topic from other
players. You will need to separate the “wheat from the chafe”
and decide what needs updates and what does not. Frequently, you
will find things that need to be clarified or made cleaned in the
rules.
This is also the
most likely stage where “imbalance” will be discovered as players
try to “break the system” for advantage. Players can see what
the designer and his buddies will miss. They are not wedded to the
game and have the right amount of distance to break it. At this
stage, you will need to re-balance and re-calculate any balancing
mechanics that are in your game. This will require multiple attempts
to get to feel right as no game has perfect balance.
From Wikimedia Commons |
Level 5- The Big Wide World
You are now ready
to release your baby into the big wide world. Be assured, it will be
savaged. Every game has detractors and critics. Guaranteed.
However, that doesn't mean what they are saying is unwarranted.
Despite the best playtesting process, things will be missed. No
playtesting group is as good as dozens or even hundreds of people
playing your game looking to find the loopholes and exploitable
points. They will be found and they will be criticized.
Again, remember
that no one has a clear vision of the Design Goals like you do. It
is ultimately up to you to determine what to do with the information
you are given. Some games do FAQs, updates, or other tricks.
Depending on how your game went to the public you might be able to
make updates as go. Others will require separate and posted changes.
The thing to
remember is, if you get to this level of playtesting; your game is
out in the wild! You have made a game. Congratulations!
Via Wikimedia Commons |
Only the Strong Survive- Where is it
at?
So, we have been
following the process for Only the Strong Survive. Where is
it at with play testing? Good question. I have completed Level 1,
and am ready to move onto Level 2.
Through using
level 1, I discovered a couple of issues:
- I made some modifications to the reaction process. Instead, it took Instinct Dice to be allocated for a Reaction test to even be made. Therefore, a player would be forced to decide if they wanted the chance to react or if it was better to put it all into an Attack or Defense instead. Again, another decision point.
- I also made some tweaks to how and when you allocate Instinct dice.
- The method of determining who starts the turn was streamlined and provided for. Before it was unclear.
These were all tweaks or gaps that I found while just working through the game on paper and typing out the rules into a document for playtesting. This found the obvious gaps or clunky bits. Now, it is time to test if the game actually works on the table. Onward to Phase 2!
If you want to help out with the playtesting you can check out the draft rules here. Feel free to comment on them on the Messageboard. Thanks for your help!
S.S. Onward from Wikimedia Commons |