Practical Game Design

What to playtest?

Anything that cannot be verified within the confines of your development team is a potential playtesting candidate. A well prepared playtest will be confined to a particular set of questions that your team wants to answer, for example:

• Are the controls easy to understand and use?
• Do players like and care about their character?
• Is this area/mechanic/enemy/puzzle too difficult or too easy?
• Are people motivated to keep on playing?

Such questions and hypothesis are often a part of the production milestone and determine whether the game should continue as is, change its course, or even get canceled.

Testing the whole game without focus is rarely a good idea. The broader the spectrum of feedback, the harder it becomes to capture ...