How I Handle Playtesting

hey this is Jonas I'm an indie game developer currently working on an indie game called way you snail a rage game platformer where you go up against a super human evil AI that tries to predict your moves and then spawns traps in real time in order to destroy you but in this video I actually want to talk about play testing because that's what I'm doing at the moment I'm polishing and I'm in the midst of play testing the heck out of this game so here's how I handle play testing for my games why should you care about play testing very simple answer you will make better game making games is like painting blindly you need other people to look at your painting in order to tell you how it looks like here's one way you can do Dredd I have will you snail discord group for now mostly a bunch of play testers in there uploading your game to Steam is actually quite useful make sure all of your play testers always stay up to date with the newest version of the game and then I have a couple of ways to gather feedback from them the first one of course being right here in discord whenever they discover something or want

to discuss something with me they can do so right here in this Court then I set up two more ways you're in the game there is a button in the main menu of the game there's a button called give feedback and whenever you press that feedback form opens up where you can or where playtesters can give direct feedback to me prefilled a little bit with the current version of the game and then they can here tell me if it's feedback or if it's a bug report they want to submit and what they want to give feedback on which level and what they want to say so just a very quick short feedback form where whenever a play tester notice something that feels off or could be improved they can just drop it right here in the feedback form directly from the game which I feel is quite a useful workflow all of that feedback of course ends up in one place where I can look it up I use Google Forms my Google Forms is super useful and super easy used for this I'm sure there are other free services you can use you don't have to use Google Forms but Google Forms is just a very easy choice to make right I can show you how it looks like in a sec generally I just

get all of the answers in a nice table like this where I can see exactly which game version was displayed on and then I have all of the feedback in one collected place right here with all of the information I need so that is the the first way I collect feedback and of course the way you set those feedback forms up is just in your G Drive ride you can press right click performs ya here blank form and then you can basically set up service super easily here you can just type in your question type in the possible answers SiC between different question types etc set resolve for playtesting I highly recommend Google Forms and then whenever I'm working on the game I can just probably step-by-step work my way through that feedback which is great you don't have to be afraid that anything gets lost because of course here in the discord group where people are just randomly posting stuff and feedback every now and then I don't write all of that down right away so I'll forget a lot of that stuff always tell people if it's something important please post it to the feedback form right away because that way I won't miss it because of

course I read that stuff right I'm I'm not gonna miss anything here and then I've actually set up another feedback form this is a very crude feedback form that I make my play testers answer that just covers the current version of the game which is beta 1.0 and here I just wanted to gather some feedback on what they wanted me to work on next this I think is extremely useful what do you want more storytelling a level selection and visual overhaul more replayability more content more interactions with the AI or accessibility settings like eerie binding colorblind mode assist mode etc etc this just gives me some super useful intel on what people think i should focus on and one thing that really surprised me is that really pretty much everybody wants more storytelling in the game pretty much everybody thinks i should put more effort and more detail into the storytelling which i find really fascinating and then on place 2 is a level select screen and the friend's high score table and um place number three is more replayability and more content what you have to keep in

mind with surveys like this is that this is the opinion of people who are already passionate about the game who have already played the game the opinion of those people is gonna be a lot different than from people who haven't played your game yet for example the visual overhaul is not something that is super popular it's not something a lot of people think i should focus on here as you can see however when you look at it from a marketing standpoint better visuals would definitely lead to more sales so that gives it a big bump in my personal priority I'll definitely try to do a various a couple of minor improvements to the visuals as well but overall this is super interesting and then this right here I laughed this question this is such a great question I'm such a big fan of that question I really have to remember that one imagine I published will you snail exactly the way it is right now you had high expectations and bought the game for around ten bucks on Steam a few days ago now you're writing a review on Steam and you don't care about my feelings because you don't know me so I'm putting people in that hypothetical situation of writing a sim

review if I released the game in the current state and the responses I got they feel so much like real steam reviews it's amazing I thought there would be a lot more biased and not really useful but they actually turn out to be super useful I'm gonna be honest with you steam is a tough marketplace Steam users are a tough crowd they will let you know what they think about your game and once you've published your game it's too late you cannot change the steam reviews once they're on Steam they are on Steam so this is really really really great because it gives me a rough idea of which steam reviews I could expect if I publish the game like this and this also gives me a very good idea of what I need to focus on next let's read some of this out here overall it's a fun game yeah I was especially fun in the beginning but the entertainment wears off once you understand the system say something about how you died last and there's no development of AI character over time I wish the game had a bit more to uncover and to do at the site because as it stands it's really linear and answers barely any of the

questions that opens up story wise as you ever ask that's a shame because when it's a storytelling they are usually pretty compelling moments and you get the point yet that is actually a pretty realistic steam review that could appear like this on my steam page and now I can still do something about this now I can still change this later on once the game is released it'll be too late the story is way unfinished and there are many things that just don't make any sense the game is good and it's one of my most played games this year after playing 34 plus hours I can say that this is one of the best platformer games 2020 so hard I couldn't even pass the first level two long introduction difficulty curve too steep I got frustrated and quit literally in the first level would only recommend this for try hearts once again extremely extremely useful never seen a question that gives this awesome and useful results like this this question seems to be pure gold I bought this game because of its interesting graphics and story I found the story a bit lacking

yci evil why does you want to destroy the world sounds like just a basic evil AI plot to me while the game stays somewhat interesting by switching up its mechanics all the time I feel like the mechanics more often than not don't really build up on each other and often just exist as a mechanics grab back never going all that deep though yeah so this is this is gold this is very useful also kind of stresses me out a little bit because I feel like I won't be able to address all of these issues till the game comes out but here's one thing you can consider as well all of the things you can't address in the game itself you can at the very least try to address in the marketing so if I realize that okay this game just doesn't appeal to casual players it only appeals to really hardcore platformer fans then at the very least I can address that in the marketing a little bit make sure I communicate that clearly because if I make sure to communicate clearly and honestly what my game is then I can make sure people who don't like the game don't download the game in the first place therefore avoiding negative reviews like this because if you don't

download the game you can't give a review but we'll see we'll see I still have a little bit of time left another thing I do in will you snail with my test group right now is collecting data and of course nowadays if you're collecting data you need to be quite careful that you're upfront honest about this you need to let people know you need to get their consent ideally speaking you need some sort of legal text that give some very precise information about what you're doing with you with the data collected however as I'm going with a very small test group for now I decided to compromise a little bit on that right now for my plate as this is what I show at the beginning of the game I tell them I do collect your data and please only proceed if you agree with that as I'm just working with a very small team of play testers I feel like this is a good compromise in the finished game of course I will make sure there's no data collection I'll just get rid of all of that in the final game because I don't want to bother with all of that legal stuff that comes with it now let's have a look at game analytics to come let's see how it looks like well once again this is just a very nice free tool that you can use you can have all

of the data and I can either try to analyze the data right here in their online tool or they're also a way to download the data which is what what I went for three for example I can have a look at the progression events like how many levels were started how often rather levels failed and then I can also apply all sorts of filters to it only have a look at certain levels or something like that so this just gives me a nice overview but fortunately it's a bit still a bit clunky which is why I decided to just bulk download the entire data which luckily you can do on this website the data I downloaded was about three thousand JSON files of wrote a little script that extracts the information that I need from those JSON files and put it in a nice little table like this one right here here can see all the levels on the left are all of the level names and then here's all of the data that I was interested in which is level starts level deaths and level completes and then these both here are for the difficulty which I can use to calculate the average difficulty the level was completed on because and will use nail there are four different

difficulty settings 0 1 2 & 3 0 3 is the maximum this entire table allows me to see all of the win rates and all of the levels the average difficulty each level is completed on and this over here is also very crucial information how many people got stuck in that level and how many people stopped playing in the level that is super useful information and all of these three data points combined pretty much let me know which levels are the most difficult ones which ones are need to made easier and of course although which levels I can make a little bit perhaps seven people got stuck in this level it has a wind rate of three percent and it was completed on an average difficulty of 0.29 which which basically means that everybody who played it completed on the lowest difficulty now I know this level needs to be a lot easier and in fact this also gives me a lot of in useful information in general because if we have a look at the average difficulty each level was completed and then we can see that all of the numbers are extremely low which

basically means that the easiest difficulty is probably not easy enough yet pretty much everybody seems to be playing on the lowest difficulty setting available and the wind rates are still pretty low in a lot of levels the only logical conclusion for that is the easiest difficulty of the game is still too hard I think thanks to that data right here I'll be able to smooth out the difficulty curve quite a lot let's have a look at some of my older projects here you can see that even for one of my older mobile games called sniffy I collected already collected some data I'm from a very small test group back then but still back then the way I did it is that the game just exported all of the data into a file and then I asked all of my play testers to give me that file so I could have the data and that way once again you can see here how often they died in which levels or once again I could see which levels were causing problems and which levels I had to make easier as the creator of the game as somebody who's playing the games all of the time it is really hard for me

to judge how difficult levels actually are because of course I have a lot of practice playing the game that makes data like this pretty essential for smoothing out the difficulty curve which then you can even display it like this kind of where the difficulty spikes in the game are right on the x axis are all of the levels and then on the y-axis the attempts and in general you can already this looks kind of nice right you want to have a gradual increase here and difficulty probably but you don't want to have are these spikes so I probably used the data to get rid of those spikes all see here back then the way I did these surveys was just on paper let's give people a sheet of paper ask them what do you think fill that out and that is actually still a great way to do things if your local events like game jams or like a little game deaf meetups where you have people play it as your game and just have a couple of these papers always lying next to your game with a pen so people can fill this out and give you some feedback some targeted feedback to what interests you right of course you can collect all kinds of stats is

like a two-player Kombat game called fish dwell where I was tracking how much damage each ability dealt on average so I used that to balance out the abilities of a player to make sure they all deal about the amount of damage I want them to deal that was very very useful besides that what you can do is of course just looking over people's shoulders when they play it test your game like what you see right here is a situation from game school where we had a couple of other students play our game cake shift if you directly watching people play your game and it's very important not to interfere with what's going on try to be completely silent and just see what they can figure out by themselves usually there's nobody around to explain the game so you have to assume that nobody explains to the game which means every time you have to intervene every time you have to tell people something that is something you have to write down that is something you have to fix looking over people's shoulders definitely is extremely useful on the one hand because you can see exactly how people react are they annoyed are they having fun and that gives you a lot of additional useful information to just see their phrase see how they're reacting but at the same

time it also screws with the test scenario a little bit because often times they're afraid to stop playing so you don't really get any useful data on how fun they really think the game is because if they were playing the game alone they might have quit a long time ago and they'll just keep playing to make you happy or give it another shot because you're watching them so that is something to keep in mind when watching people play your game directly they're not acting the same way as they would if they played the game at home similar thing also counts for when you ask people to send you a video of them playing the game that's a very similar scenario people know that you will watch that video and that will make them act a little differently as far as asking people to record themselves playing your game of course another great life hack especially if you don't have any play testers locally you can just ask people online to record themselves playing the game which is a great way to get this kind of feedback I think one of the most difficult things about play testing is actually going through all of the feedback and deciding what is valid

what do you want to do what you want to listen to and what you want to discard because usually if you're placing you are bombarded with huge amounts of feedback with huge amounts of ideas and in general what I would really say is listen to trends don't listen to individual opinions because if somebody says okay that part of the game stinks I don't like that that is just one opinion that is really not enough of a test sample to really make a decision based on that but if you have a lot of people saying the same things or saying similar things then it is probably something you should listen to and something you should pay attention to sometimes people are saying one thing but really means something entirely different sometimes they say something like this enemy is damn like I don't like that enemy it doesn't give me enough time to react worse what they actually mean is the game didn't really do a good job preparing you for that situation maybe that enemy isn't all that hard once you know how to do with it so whenever you get feedback you also have to look like at the context a little bit is what they're saying really what they mean or is there another issue that is causing

what they're saying and you can already see that there are a lot of different ways to play test your game all of them come with different upsides all of them come with different down sides you can't rely purely on data you can't rely purely on looking over people's shoulders you can't rely purely on videos that people send you in the best-case scenario you really want to get a healthy mix of all of these one question that you might have is what do you do if you don't find any player search one thing you can try of course is joining our discord there are a lot of game developers in there some of them might be happy to try out your game and maybe you can play somebody else's game in return that would only be fair and other than that like the way I did it earlier when I didn't have a youtube audience was I just asked friends I asked my sister sometimes my parents there's still a lot of ways you can go about it oh yeah oh yeah one really important information as well I'm currently looking for translators if you want to translate will you snail to a different language join the will you snail discord link in

the description also if you if you're excited about the game also join the willya snail discord there's now an official will use snail discord but especially if you want to help translate the game and get in touch with me have you ever asked yourself why you're here you taught me how to manipulate it kill on your behalf so that's what I did [Music]