Development Journey: What My First Playtest Taught Me About Game Design

In the third week of COSMOS, we had our very first playtest that Friday.

Before we started, our instructors went over the instructions for running a playtest. We were told not to interfere at all with the playtesting process in order to get an authentic player experience. As the person with the most knowledge on how Whisker worked, I ran the playtests.

In the first round of playtests, our professors or our fellow clustermates could come and try out our games. I was personally very excited to show my game now that it was a complete prototype. However, almost as soon as they started playing, errors popped up. The game barely worked which surprised me as I had played through the game myself with almost no problems. The most glaring flaw was the lack of a tutorial: I had forgotten to include the details on how to play the game.

The playtest provided valuable input on my game and so by lunch time, I was already reworking my game. This time I made sure to include a written tutorial which would be given to the player through the dialogue, adding invisible walls, and minor fixes to improve the gameplay flow.

The second round of playtests were more successful, but I realized from this how much more I needed to learn!