Game Design
19 The Design Process: More About Playtesting
In the early part of playtesting, when you are playing the game with your team, here are some things you should be looking for:
Does the game meet your design goals?
Is it fun, at least for you? While you are not the ideal playtester to judge effectiveness most of the time, if you are not having fun then most other people will probably not either.
Are there any holes in the rules?
A “hole” is a situation where the rules simply do not say how to proceed. For example, perhaps one of your rules is that a player’s army can attack another player’s army, but you don’t yet have rules for resolving the attack. What happens in this case? In practice, what happens is that the players sit around and wait while the designer figures out what to do!
As an example, consider these rules for Tic-Tac-Toe played on a 4×4 grid:
- Players: 2
- Objective: Get a straight line of symbols.
- Setup: Draw a 4×4 square grid.
- Progression of play: On your turn, place your symbol (“X” or “O”) on an empty square.
- Resolution: If either player on their turn has a set of four of their symbol in a straight line (across, down, or diagonally), they win.
If you try to play this game just following the rules, you’ll quickly realize that you can’t even start – nowhere does it say which player is X or O, or who takes the first turn! To fix this, you would add a situation to handle this. For example:
Setup: Draw a 4×4 square grid. Choose a player to go first, who is assigned the symbol “X”. The other player is given the symbol “O”.
Are there any dead ends?
A “dead end” is a game state where there is no way to proceed further, but the game is not resolved. Consider our revised 4×4 Tic-Tac-Toe rules above. Suppose that both players fill up all squares on the board without anyone winning. At this point the game cannot proceed, because the rules say a player must place their symbol on an empty square. There is no empty square, so the player cannot take a turn. But there is also no resolution, because neither player has won. In this case, a new rule would have to be added (such as: in the resolution, if neither player can make a legal move and no one has won, then the game ends in a tie).
Are any of the rules unclear?
It is natural for us to assume things that are in our head, to the point that we often forget to write them down in our rules. Try to look at your rules and see if there is anything you are assuming that your players might not.
Are there any really obvious rules exploits?
Is there a single strategy that wins the game easily? Try to find it. It’s much less embarrassing if you find and fix it yourself, as opposed to having it discovered by your playtesters (or worse, your players after you release the game). Clarity and exploits are often hard to find in your own game; you tried to design this game to not have any problems, after all. Still, make an honest effort, and sometimes you will be rewarded by finding and fixing