Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design, 3rd Edition

Level 19The Play’s the Thing

AS A GAME designer, you are going to play your game many times over. I have lost track of how many hundreds, if not thousands, of times I have played a level during the development of a game. I’d play a level over and over and over and over again because I was trying to make it “just right.” You will play your game so many times that you will become the world’s best player of your game—until you hand it over to the QA team or get it into the hands of the public. They will always end up being better players than you for some reason!

But playing a game to test something—such as a fix to the geometry and testing a combat animation—is very different than playtesting your game. To understand the need for playtesting, you need to understand the concept of systems first.

Thinking in Systems

You see, a game is nothing more than a system. And a system is a series of interactions.¹ Playtesting evaluates those interactions to make sure that they are doing what they need to be doing. So, let’s talk about systems.

Systems are made up of four things:

• Stocks
• Flows
• Dependencies
• Feedback Loops

A stock is something you can count. An element you can measure. It’s measured as a physical quantity and it’s usually a noun word, but not always.² A stock in a video game can be anything from the number of coins that are spread throughout a level to the player’s score in the game. It can be the amount of health or ammunition a player possesses. It can be a lever or button ...