The Struggles of Early Testing
Prequel Devlog 2
Intro
Between worldbuilding, game mechanics, art, and all else developers can spend hordes of time “working” on a game without answering the fundamental question.
“Is my game fun to play?”
No matter how grant or clever we thing or ideas are, nothing matters until your mechanics are actually experienced by a player. For Prequel, I wanted to make a point of testing as early as possible so we could get early feedback on the game’s direction.
Playtest Goals
The goal of the playtest is to get a feeling for the game, for what is “fun” and what is not. A great piece of advice I learned while working on Teamfight Tactics is:
“We can always fix the numbers later but we can’t make something unfun, fun.”
For the first playtest, mechanics too strong or too weak are way less important than whether players find them interesting to interact with. In UX terms, we’re looking for qualitative evidence that supports whether our assumptions about the game’s initial design matches the player’s expectations and in what critical areas does the game break down.
Just from the fact that we’re going from zero user feedback to some should provide valuable guidance toward where the game’s “fun” is.
Testing before we even have a complete draft of the rules should also give us ample time to do major reworks to game mechanics or restart from scratch if nothing seems to be working.
Preparing for the Playtest
For the playtest we focused on creating a “minimal viable product” which basically means making sure we have all the rules we need to play the game.
That means the games we need to run the game, not run the game well.
For this playtest, we were blessed in being able to leverage two of our major inspirations Hunt and Microscope to pull together the basic rules. On top of this, we had enough character options to support 3 players and 1 adversary, the Fiend.
We had some general understanding on how we were going to run gameplay but a lot of rules were still informal assumptions.
We wrote up a basic playtest script including introductory questions to help benchmark each player’s assumptions going into the game, their background playing rpgs, and their feedback once the game is completed. The playtest script also served as a central spot to collect and organize notes throughout the session.
For reference materials, we used Google Slides and I was extremely impressed. The shape and textbox tools available allow you to kit bash a very basic layout. The “slides” formal let us easily segment basic gameplay references, character abilities, and Game Master information all into separate slides.
Running the Playtest
The Good
We played the game (and some parts were really fun). During character creation, players worked together to setup the beginning of the world’s timeline.
We ended up with a cool magic/technology hybrid where the explosion of an experimental train caused a rift into hell to open.
The game almost took on a cool devil magic/wild west theme as found our final fight happening at a cattle ranch owned by the fiend.
How cool is that?
Players were constantly talking on their turns, deciding how they would plan up to 3 turns in advance to navigate combat and do the most damage to boss.
After selecting their move each player and the evil added to the game’s timeline
Some cool moments included:
Cut off a player’s arm to save them from a collapsing junk yard
A suspicious character added earlier in the timeline revealed to be a secret ally
A player’s sibling killing the fiend’s lieutenant and taking their place
We defiantly saw a lot of greenlights on how cool this game can become!
The Bad
Players were really into both figuring out how to both maximize their abilities both in combat and on the timeline.
Problems started to show in two ways:
Some of the abilities and prompts were more interesting than others
It takes longer create a cool answer to a story prompt than hit for 1 damage
On both sides, we defiantly saw frustration with either the more simple or less thought out abilities. Similar sentiments to an average D&D game where you wait 5 minutes for your turn and hit the enemy 1 time before passing.
I would say that 50% of our abilities (either on the combat or world building side) were actually super engaging players with another 25% being to simple and 25% being practically useless.
We defiantly are going to have to rework a lot of these BUT THAT’S WHY WERE TESTING SO EARLY
Imagine if we were a month out from crowdfunding before learning this.
Fortunately, we have a good reference of what abilities players were engaging with so we have a clear direction how to change things.
The Ugly
We expected testing the game so early/informally would be rough but running the game was rough. T
There were a few times we had to backtrack on rules or make spur of the moment rulings to cover scenarios we hadn’t accounted for.
The players understandably had questions about how different procedures or abilities in the game worked and we had to come up with a quick answer to keep gameplay moving.
Fortunately we’re ttrpg designers so bullshitting rules to players is our specialty.
Personally, this was the worst feeling during the playtest: Getting into the flow of the game only to be pulled out once we had to address an unwritten mechanic.
The roughness of play was a definite time sink and forced us to “fast-forward” during the session, preventing us from fully testing the full fight.
None of this is surprising and these are all things that will improve with revision.
But I’ll defiantly be thinking about ways to mitigate this type of rough awkwardness for playtests I run in the future.
Key Takeaways
Unclear Themes and Background
Playtesters had a level of ambiguity from the name. In initial questions there wasn’t a clear understanding of what the game would be about. The general language of the title led playtesters to assume a more setting agnostic system would be presented.
“Would assume it would be more on the story telling game of tabletop, just the fact that it's more of a literary term”
“You’re either staring from an existing story and going backwards, or setting up something for later, wouldn’t necessarily assume its a tactical game, gives a little implication of being genre agnostic”
Divergent understanding of the theme continued into play. During initial world building each playtester seemed to initially veer in differing direction in terms of setting and theme,
One player went for kind of regular “swords-and-sorcery” fantasy
One player went more magic slightly industrial fantasy
One player was positioned more game of thrones/high fantasy
There was a level of awkwardness as these themes converged leading to some aspects being chosen over others. Although this was not a wholly negative experience as each player got to add an element to the world’s “premise”, the level of awkwardness could probably be minimized with a more formal process.
Blank Page Problems
Throughout the early stages of the game, playtesters encountered a high level of difficulty tackling the initial blank page of world building. Placing initial events for characters with no additional context on the timeline proved difficult but eventually smoothed out as more events/locations were added to the map.
As combat continued playtesters seemed to experience a level of fatigue from having to create new events and connections on the timeline.
“And then you have to come up with another location, and then you’re on the spot”
Whether this fatigue comes from the amount of prompts needing to be added or not having easy guide rails or examples to easily jump off from is unknown.
As the game went on later and the timeline continued to grow larger, ambiguity into the duration of time passage on the timeline began to grow. Playtesters began to become more confused on where to place events on the graph.
“ could maybe be something to make the timeline a little cleaner, way to break up timeline”
“some delineation, more guidance on how to insert things in the timeline, some way to make chapters/ages, if each evil had the structure of a genre, even showing it up pre and post evil”
Order of Operations
Running the game was made awkward in many ways by not having a great understanding of the proper order of operations in the game.
Examples
When to answer group, individual, and evil questions in preplanning
In what order to use actions or attacks in the game
What happens to your character after you use a legacy or doomed power?
These issues are probably due to the game’s early design state and lack of polish on rules text and procedures. This should be an easy solution just by adding a greater level of polish to the rules but should not be ignored as a minor issue.
Proportional Reward for Investment
In the wrap up discussion, playtester’s main concern was on the proportion of play spent doing building versus doing combat. Player’s felt a level of disconnect between the actions they were taking on their turns and the ambiguous “timeline” they were building.
“helping the future heroes feels vague”
Playtesters expressed the desire to add mechanisms that more directly connected the timeline to the combat.
Suggested additions
mechanism to named allies in relation to minions
prompts as charges
“quiet year” timeline to grid as map interaction?
if the scope of the map and conflict expanded to be more regional, add locations to the map
Getting bonuses for creating x number of things on the timeline
Frustrations seemed to come from inventing a lot in creating a cool timeline but not getting anything out of it in combat, the thing that actually decided the outcome of the game.
“A lot of repetitive be creative and feel good about it”
“there are no mechanically reasons so I don’t see a reason why I would do this”
It is extremely important to note that although there was a level of fatigue when it came to creating the timeline, playtesters overall enjoyed participating in creating the timeline. The high amount of discussion surrounding connecting the two and the large amount of proposed changes could be a signal that players enjoyed the system and wanted to engage with it more.
“the world building was so much fun that I wanted the fight to have more to deal with that”
things we did on the grid did not have any effect on what we had on the grid, main things
Finding ways to make players feel like the actions they are taking on their turn, both world building and attacks, should help players feel more satisfied with how they invested their time each turn.
Conclusion
Overall, testing the game as early as possible was a massive net positive. Even though we ran into some hick ups, we were able to play the game and get a good feel on all the major mechanics.
We understand now where the game is strong and the changes we need to make to improve it.
But what comes next? We’re going to have to focus on addressing the core problem areas listed, filling out all the gaps and procedure, and moving forward from MVP to Alpha quality.
Ethan and I are super excited on how the game is turning out and have a bunch of ideas on how to make it even better!