For Caught on Tape, it was incredibly important to focus on user experience and keeping the player immersed in the game. This means, everything needs to feel polished, bug-free and intuitive.
It’s one of the most challenging, yet interesting aspects of what I, as a Game Designer focused on during pre-production development. It taught me the core values of organizing playtests and analyzing its data to form a solid conclusion, leading to more and more iteration.
Video 1: Early Pre-Production stages of Caught on Tape's 3Cs systems.
I can’t recall how many iterations I have made on purely the walking aspect of our main character. One day it was too fast, the other day it felt nauseating. But one of those days, a playtester came to me and said ‘I can’t put my finger on it, but something doesn’t feel right.’
What is a developer to do with such information? How can I form a rational conclusion out of this comment alone?
My mind went to think of the quote once uttered by the industrialist Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This hints towards my point: even if the players do not know what exactly they want, it is up to the developer to be creative and think of effective solutions to, in the end, create something that is enjoyable to our players.
So how do we think of those solutions? There are multiple ways. For example, you can decide to do research, looking into existing games and/or media sources and iterate on their existing design to enhance your own. Another example would be to make playtests more specific by digging into the user experience. Keep asking questions, keep analyzing their actions and decisions, see how they react to certain things.
Image 1: Early Pre-Production survey questions for remote playtesting data.
The latter was my approach during Caught on Tape. I kept digging into the details of the aspect which didn’t feel right and found out information which I would have never gotten if I wouldn’t have playtested in the first place.
Image 2: Iteration and Playtesting Excel Log to gather data and observations to share with team members.
Upon further, iteration we double checked our now polished and iterated-upon 3Cs through playthroughs, is there anything where the players stop to think ‘What button am I supposed to press? Why am I moving like this? Why am I so slow/fast?’
In the end, we were happy with our results, but the polish phase is never over. There are always improvements to be made. Thus, a game is never truly finished.
Video 2: Metricised Gym Level displaying all planned features and systems for Caught on Tape near the end of Pre-Production phase.
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