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Time to talk about what is possibly the most important part of the #gamedev process, play testing.

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My first behind the scenes look at “proper” play testing was the featurette for God of War 2. In there @corybarlog talks about how play testing was performed for all of God of War 1 except the Hades blades.
Prior to this, I thought it was exclusively about “bug finding”. While this is part of it, to determine if a normal player might break the game, it’s much more about the experience the player has.
A game can “pass” QA (I know that QA isn’t responsible for fixing bugs, but stay with me here) and still be a poor game. Confusing puzzles, overly difficult sections and poor UI are some of the issues that can detract from player’s experience.
Trying to identify these issues as the game dev is extremely difficult. You are too close to the project to be objective. Having players with no prior knowledge of the game play through it and gauging their reactions is vital.
So I brought in @elephantabulous, @grenlith, @JayPeaPlays, @xo0xverox0ox, and @angelwind76 to play the game and provide their feedback.
In a text based game, logic in the dialogue is important. At one point I had a character say “Persecution”, but gren asked if it should be “Prosecution”. I intended the former, but if a player thinks there’s a mistake like that, it can pull them out of the experience.
At one point, I had Ube flavour referenced (probably from watching a @BingingWBabish episode) and that wasn’t commonly known. Ele brought up @xwatergaming’s fruit tier list, so kumquat was chosen to replace it (the lowest of all fruits to him).
I also never thought about the player keeping track of what they found in the evidence search. Adding a case button was suggested and I’ve seen it used every time some plays the game.
The biggest change was in the cross examination. Limitations forced me to dismiss the text before a player could interact with it. @atonofglaciers pointed out the confusion with that UI.
I completely rewrote it so the text was rendered in the background and the left/right buttons switched the scene. This was a huge improvement.
Bugs were found. Presenting evidence resulted in nothing happening 20% of the time. I has 5 “wrong answer” scenes indexed at 0, but the code selecting them was indexed at 1. I also forgot to clear all variables when a new game was started.
In the end the best thing you can do is get someone to play your game and give you feedback. The feedback I received took the game from good to great.

The game is now fully funded and heading to a stretch goal! Check it out!

kck.st/2XN4TQG
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