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

ab212525-144c-53a0-9782-5a14aea5e2ea:6udFvAlfFjsjj7eis1ka40

QA vs. Playtest

When to Playtest

Assignment: Sprint Plan after Playtest

 Plan de sprint después de la prueba de juego

Agustin Dominguez

Google Form Survey

unity_ABBB8FB9151B27AEEBC3

i love my favorite lord-Mistress

safasfafsagj

My final sprint plan to polish everything until Alpha.

High Command Sprint Plan (after playtest)

Arcane_Creator

Sprint Plan after Playtest

kot88murmansk

After the first bug reports, I drafted a project review plan and made the fixes. The new version of the game can be found here:

https://play.unity.com/mg/other/tribute-to-bs-2

Sprint Plane after Playtest

Silvana Di Bella

Sprint plan for week 4 defined after playtesting results

Sprint Plan 4

RoaaK

Cube's Revenge Trailer

Cube's Revenge

TezzaLuvsPigeons

Bonus_ QA vs Playtest.mp4

Bonus_ When to Playtest.mp4

In this tutorial you will create a Sprint Plan based on the feedback from your first Playtest and additional tips and information for Playtesting.

Unity + USC Games Unlocked

Games

This week's sprint plan will be based on the results of your playtest – actual data gathered from players.

This is the final week of development! This week's plan will be based on the results of your playtest – actual data gathered from players.

In the playtest you're running this week you'll check whether players understand your game and which parts they think are working best. If your playtest does its job, you'll learn a lot about what is and isn't working. So we recommend that you do your playtest first, using the build you submitted in the last unit, and then make your plan for this week based on what you learned.

If players think something is broken or unfinished, do you really need it? Or can you use that time better by improving the core of the experience?

As you update your backlog and choose one final round of tasks, you’ll focus mercilessly on getting the game ready for release. That might mean disabling or removing features you didn’t finish. If you have to do this, do it first, because it will likely create some bugs. You might also give yourself some time to polish assets, e.g. making sure all your sounds are at the same volume. But it’s likely most of your work this week will be fixing bugs and addressing player feedback.

The instructions are the same as other spring plans you created, but they're provided below so you can remind yourself of the steps. When you’re finished you’ll turn in some form of your sprint plan as screenshots or video capture.

These instructions describe the exact process that professional teams of all sizes use to manage the work of game development. It has several steps, and it looks long because each step is explained, but it should only take 5-10 minutes to do for a small project. 

You’ll use the same system you used when you made your backlog, whether that’s a spreadsheet, a to-do manager like Trello, or a dedicated system like JIRA. When you’re finished you’ll turn in some form of your sprint plan as screenshots or video capture.

Taking a couple of minutes to learn from your experience each week will make you a better developer. 

Get better at estimating. Look at your current sprint plan – that’s the to-do list you made last week. Observe what you did and didn’t get done. Look at the estimates of effort you made for each item. Were you able to make an accurate guess about how long the task took? If not, what was it that made the work take longer? Just stopping to think about it will make you better at estimating your work in the future. 

Recognize your hard work. You might be disappointed in your progress this week – that’s actually pretty normal. But take a moment and pat yourself on the back for what you did get done. You’ve climbed a little further toward being a game maker, and everything you did this week will be easier from now on. 

Reset. Take everything you didn’t finish and put it back in your backlog. That might mean copying and pasting in a spreadsheet or physically moving Post-It notes, depending on your system. 

Plan Leave the room. It’s a good idea to physically stand up and leave the room, but failing that, at least close your eyes. Imagine your game in its final form. Think about where your game is currently, that is, what’s already visible in the build. Then open your eyes and return to your work station. 

Update your backlog. Look at the stories in your backlog. Based on your vision of the final game, do you notice anything missing? Is anything unnecessary or not as important as you thought? Are there any stories that could be combined or split into smaller parts? 

Once you’ve updated the list of stories, look at each story in turn. Ignore its current priority and whether you’ve already done work on it. How important is it, right now, to finishing your game? Update its priority accordingly. 

Look at your availability. No week is the same. Do you have doctor appointments, lunch dates, algebra tests, or meetings with your agent? Think about each day in turn and write down how many hours you will have to give to your game this week. If the answer is zero, write zero. If you plan to work all seven days, consider taking a day off in the middle so you don’t burn out. 

Choose your tasks. Now that you’ve identified the most important remaining work and the time you have to spend on it, choose stories from your backlog that you will work on this week. As you copy them into this week’s plan, go ahead and give some thought to how you will implement them. Does your estimate of effort (1, 2, 4 or 8 hours) seem about right? When you’re done, make sure your total workload matches up with your actual availability this week. 

Sprint Plan

1. QA vs. Playtest

2. When to Playtest

3. Assignment: Sprint Plan after Playtest

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