This week in class, we had our group projects playtested by another group, and gathered information from the play session. In our reading of Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop, it was emphasized that playtesting was not just to let others play our games and gather feedback at the end of our game development, but that it is a constant thing that must be performed throughout our game development. This is to make sure that our game meets goals and visions that the team has in mind with how the player experience should be while playing the game. The sample of playtesters to be used is also an important thing when playtesting our game. Fullerton discusses that the ideal playtesters would be people who are the target audience of our game, as we would get more meaningful feedback from people who would actually buy our game as opposed to people who would probably not bother playing our game outside of a playtesting environment.

During our playtesting, we were able to pick up some notable flaws in some of our rules, and opted to change them before our submission. One of the flaws we ran into was the fact that some of the cards did not respond to a lot of cards in the deck, but the number of these niche cards were disproportionately high in the deck. This caused players to have a lot of cards that they couldn’t play for several turns. As a result, we decreased the numbers of some of the niche cards, as well as expanded the functionality of some of them to allow them to react to more cards. Overall, the group that playtested our game liked the gameplay and the overall premise of the game.

However, because our game was an analog card game, we could not get a completely accurate reference for how our game would have done if we could allow the players to play the game in person. This is because we as developers had to constantly be part of the gameplay process, because we used video streaming to allow the players to “play” the game, and we had to constantly explain what each card does because the video quality made the description of the cards too blurry for the players to remember what each card does.

Sources:

Fullerton, Tracy, et al. Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games.