Blog - Keeping Faith in the Face of Play Testers
Saturday, March 1, 2008"Nothing feels worse than giving people the game you've poured all this work and love into, only to find they hate it, and don't think it's fun."
That was (at least approximately) said by my professor/mentor while observing a play testing session of a board game me and a group of other students had been working on. The game is a sort of museum-heist simulation. It was developed by me, David McDonough, Dan Wilkins, and James Caskey.
Our group of play testers had, the day before, been unsure about the rules, and didn't get far into playing the game. Their feedback then on what to clarify in the rule-set was very useful. The criticism was more welcome, somehow.
But this second day of testing with them? Now they knew how to play our game at least as far as one could from only the rules, and their early response was not good. They weren't having fun with our game. Indeed, that is somehow a much harder blow to take.
Our game featured a traitor-mechanic, where one player is secretly a traitor trying to sabotage the group. A player was determined to be the traitor too early in the game, and was upset at being continually excluded from rounds. The other players seemed to be pulling ahead to an easy victory. The game seemed... well, stupid.
But I kept the faith.
When they were complaining that it was way too easy for the loyal players to win vs. the traitor, I warned them that during our personal play testing the traitor won more games than the players did.
The testers didn't yet see how that was possible. I kept up the faith.
The testers kept playing and eventually the game clicked right in their heads. They got it.
I knew from past testing sessions with the other guys on the project that the "loyal" players always seem like they're going to win at first. That's how the traitor spins his web of treachery.
The fact that traitor got found too quickly ended up not mattering as the other players discovered too late that they had used up all their allowed opportunities to stop him already. They wasted all their counter-attacks on him at the beginning of the game, when the traitor is meant to lay low anyway, as his 'attacks' are only more useful at the end of the game when the stakes grow higher.
So, after some initial terror of thinking our game sucked, the play testers ended up really enjoying our game.
Despite earlier in the game where he was found out and frustrated by being excluded from so many turns, the traitor ended up winning the game. Sweet revenge.
They said there wasn't anything our game needed to change. I'll call that a success.
I'm still awaiting Brenda's feedback, when she has played the game.
Edit- the game's title is under construction again after having been declared "weak". Also, expect a postmortem article on this project to appear in the near future... posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 7:09 PM
0 Comments: