What is Playtesting?

How To Playtest

Sprint Plan

Review and Redesign

Playtesting is more than just asking people if your game is fun. It's a structured process for collecting useful information about specific parts of your design. In this project you will learn why Playtesting helps you collect useful information on your design and how to execute the entire process. 

Playtesting

Course Introduction and Planning

Game Jams and Skilling Up

Set your goals and find your community

What is the Design Process? 

Scope

Constraints and Our Theme

Concentric Design

Why Prototype? 

Assets shouldn't be liabilities

The Stages of Game Development

Planning your project

CRC Cards

Your First Milestone: Vertical Slice

Why Agile?

Vertical Slice - Part Two

Refactoring

Sprint Planning

Alpha Build

How to Release your Game

Alpha and Beyond

Bonus Content

In this project you will learn about what's ahead for you on your journey to finishing a game! You'll also get a chance to confirm that you have the right knowledge and skills to get the most out of the course, along with links to useful resources that will help you on your way. You will also learn how to equip yourself for your journey, and meet some of your fellow adventurers.

Goal Setting and Community Building

In this project you will learn about using a design process to take your idea from a broad concept into a finished, polished game, the concept of scope will help you achieve your goal of making a game, how constraints can help you create rules to keep you in scope,  and how to use the specific design process, concentric design.

The Design Process

In this project you will find out if your game idea is fun through Prototyping. You will also learn how to make a plan for assets you will use in your game – the sounds, images, models, animations and other resources that make up a game – to avoid nasty surprises later in development. 

Prototyping

In this project you will learn how to keep a sense of the big picture by dividing the game development process into stages and milestones, hit your first major milestone in the development of a game through creating a vertical slice, and learn two planning tools you can use to plot a course to a finished game. 

Milestones

Agile Development

Professional teams schedule some time for code cleanup after each milestone so their code stays flexible and easy to work with. This project will give you some tips and general principles for this process, known as refactoring. With your vertical slice done and your code in good shape, this is where you’ll start down the road to alpha.

Writing Better Code

In this project you will learn how to release your game, what the next steps are after game release, and additional tips for getting to the end. 

Release your game

Lots of people start games, but it’s surprisingly hard to finish one. This course guides you through the process used by professional game makers to develop their ideas, keep their projects on track and deliver a complete, released game. 

 that will help you quickly design and prototype your games. These resources can accelerate your development process and help you achieve your goal of releasing a polished game!

Design and Publish Your Original Game: Unity USC Games Unlocked

910c5c57-e513-5740-b239-ff9ed5f83a69:IJ50VM7ryBj2kIwUvpGqHc

Analytics.pdf

MetricManager_Demo.zip

Playtest Overview

Preparing your Questionnaire

Assignment: PlayTest

Optional: Adding Analytics

https://play.unity.com/es/games/11e9d8c1-1fec-42ac-a481-5722f1b84a65/equiilibrista

Please do answer the Forms link below after playtesting. Thank you in advance.

Prueba de juego

Agustin Dominguez

https://thecodeisbugged.itch.io/brain-out-dungeon

Please do answer the Google Forms link below after playtesting. Thank you in advance.

If you have a free time, try out my project game.

unity_ABBB8FB9151B27AEEBC3

I'm a beginner and would like to get a general opinion of my game first. That's why I only asked to tell me the aspect you like best and what you like least, leaving you free to make any comments.

https://play.unity.com/mg/other/tribute-to-bs-1

you can kill me if you like me and i love a lot people >_<

safasfafsagj

Ran a few playtests; mixed results, but I felt I needed to simplify the controls, and make the tutorial less confusing.

High Command Playtesting

Arcane_Creator

PlayTest

kot88murmansk

Tribute to BS: PlayTest 

Silvana Di Bella

Takeaways from the playtest I had done for my game

Playtest results

RoaaK

Cube's Revenge Trailer

Cube's Revenge play test

TezzaLuvsPigeons

Preparing Your Questionnaire.mp4

How_to_Playtest.mp4

Now that you understand what playtesting is and why designers use it, it's time to do it yourself. This session will walk you through how to create a questionnaire and how to address the results.

Unity + USC Games Unlocked

Games

 It’s time to put your game in front of real players!

You probably feel like you’re not ready for this – like you just need to finish that one feature, or fix that bug, and then you’ll be ready. Getting through that feeling is by far the hardest part of this assignment. But it’s what professionals do, because it really is the only way to know if your design is working while you still have time to fix it.

Following the process described in the videos, you’ll be ready to get the information that is most relevant to your game and most useful to you as a designer.

You are encouraged to do some of your testing with other members of the course if possible. Participating in other students' playtests will help them out and help you feel more comfortable showing your work.

Take a deep breath. Remind yourself this is just one game project out of all the games you’ll make. Then go run your test!

The first step is to think about what information would be most useful to you as a designer. Then you’ll know what to ask in your questionnaire. The provided questionnaire template includes five starter questions that apply to nearly every game. Look below for some examples of questions that are more specific. 

Make a copy of the questionnaire template and put your questions after the five provided. 

Print out several copies of the questionnaire and be sure to bring them with you to the test. If you prefer, you can turn the questionnaire into a form on Google, SurveyMonkey, or another online service. 

Here are some examples of questions you might write that are specific to your game: 

The CAMERA always worked in a way that best supported game play. 

Overall I ENJOYED the MAGIC system in the game. 

I think the AIMING controls were EASY TO USE. 

I felt I had ENOUGH CHOICES for moves on the board at any given time. 

I understood WHY Izuku wanted to stop the helicopter. 

Analytics, also known as metrics, are data automatically gathered by your game through scripts. They can help you see patterns in player behavior and experience. For more details, see the next step. For reference, this is also offered as a PDF in Tutorial Materials. 

Now that your build and your questionnaire are ready, go ahead and run the tests. Remember, try to avoid explaining things to your players! Review the videos for this week for the details of how to prepare and how to get the most useful information out of your test sessions. 

Once you’ve collected all the data, it’s time to think about what it means and decide how to respond. As you saw in the video, you’ll start by carefully reviewing your notes, the questionnaire answers and any analytics you collected. Look for patterns in what your players did and said, but take note of anything that seems important, even if only one tester reported it. 

Write down a bulleted list of the 5-6 most important results – that is, the ones that surprise you or tell you the most about problems with your game. Phrase them as neutral observations, like “only one of five players ever used the double jump”, rather than “double jump broken”. 

Next, think about what might explain those findings. For example, here are several reasons why players might not use the double jump in a game, because: 

they don’t know it’s there or think it’s a bug 

they think it’s doing something else, like a wall jump 

the controls for it are turned off or don’t work properly 

there’s nothing in the level that actually requires it 

the animation is confusing or distracting 

Think about what you observed in the tests, look through your notes again and choose what seems like the most likely cause (or causes). Write this down next to the observation. 

Finally, think about whether and how you want to change the game in response to these conclusions. You don’t have to respond to everything every player tells you – for example, many potential players might say that a detailed sports sim like Madden is too complicated, or a physics game like Angry Birds is too simple. The designers of those games chose to accept that their games weren’t for everyone. 

But your game does need to work for some audience, not just you. Professional designers put their pride aside for the good of the game. If your players simply don’t understand what’s happening, figure out how to give them more or better feedback. If they consistently tell you it’s too hard, find a way to build up to the challenging sections. 

Think about the smallest adjustments you can make to address the problem without introducing new ones. If you’re close to the end of development, that might mean simply cutting a feature that isn’t working or simplifying a puzzle that’s too hard. Choose what you’ll do and add it to your product backlog and/or sprint plan for this week. 

Write a questionnaire based on the template we’ve provided above.

Test your game and use the questionnaire to collect information from playtests.

Optionally, add some simple analytics to your game.

Summarize the most important results, and how you intend to address them, in a bulleted list. Take screenshots or do a video capture of the takeaways of your playtesting and share them to the gallery. 

Analytics, also known as metrics, are data automatically gathered by your game through scripts. They can help you see patterns in player behavior and experience. For example: 

Players die twice as often in Level 6 as in any other level. 

On average, players spend only a few seconds getting through Level 3. 

Players never choose to save the space spiders from extinction. 

Only 2% of players solve the ham sandwich puzzle. 

Here are two options for adding analytics to your game. 

The first option is to use the bare-bones metrics script we’ve provided in a demo project for this assignment. 

You’ll have your scripts call the MetricManager when something happens that you want to track, e.g. a player death. The script will write out the results to a text file when your player closes the game. The text file will be called something like YourGameName_metrics_120719.txt and it will appear right next to your game’s executable – that is, YourGame.exe or YourGame.app. 

This option is simple and easy to set up, but it has limitations. It will only be useful for a small set of simple metrics, and you need to be able to get to the text file once it’s generated. So either players will have to play the game on your computer, or you’ll have to ask them to find the text file on their own computer after they’ve played the game. 

The other option is to use Unity’s free, built-in analytics. Here are a couple of tutorials on setting it up: 

Brackeys How to use Unity Analytics (12 minutes, also covers Remote Settings) 

Unity3d.college shows a somewhat more sophisticated setup with a more realistic example. 

The analytics feature sends out information to Unity’s online analytics service, which then displays the data on a web-based dashboard. The dashboard has several kinds of graphs and filters to let you explore your data. Unity Analytics is only a little harder to set up than the text- file option, and the dashboard’s built-in graphs are great for most basic analytics. 

However, it has the downside that you won’t see your data right away. As you’re setting up your events you can see the data inside the Unity Editor, so you can test your setup. But it can take several hours to a day before you see the results in your dashboard. 

How To Playtest

1. Playtest Overview

2. Preparing your Questionnaire

3. Assignment: PlayTest

4. Optional: Adding Analytics

Your submission preview

Complete this Exercise