Game development stories: God playing gamers.

Hello there!

Game developers are the ones behind all the mechanics in the game. They know all the power-ups, moves, combinations, levels and every little bit of the game that tickles.

So you think that when they start to test their games, they'll be the almighty gods of their own creations? Will they conquer any game they make and turn everyone's euphoric expressions into expressions of utter terror and misery?

Well, I believe you are terribly mistaken.

Because you see, when a game is in it's early stages of testing, developers have little experience with actually testing the game.

Obviously they have that edge of knowing how to play the game but they don't know how to experience the game. You see, it's like the developer is like a child making buildings out of Lego and the gamers are the people in the world.

The developer obviously knows every train station and building off by heart but they don't have the experience of living in the town, hence they don't know whether players are struggling finding what to do or where to go.

Developers like myself play testing their game is like the child shrinking themselves into their own little Lego world, to see that their world is actually living and breathing; they take the position of the gamer.

The incredibly strange thing about this, is the fact that the developer (at first) is just like the newbie players. They get their faces handed to them by the monsters that reside within the game world. Next thing they see is a load of dead corpses from many players - failing to get across the first boss (or even enemy).

The developer gets killed quite quickly.

They realize that the boss is way too difficult.

The developer reverts back to their former role and makes the monsters slightly easier to beat. The developer realizes that the players become stronger as they fight the bosses with confidence. The developer fights the boss, and quite easily too. Because they know the game well.

Well not exactly easily, but they do defeat the boss relatively quickly (much like the other gamers).

The developer understands both sides and now he has mastered one of the most greatest aspect of Game development.

This story is strikingly similar to the development of Bounty Hunter II, Catwalk and RedBlue Adventures.

I'm pretty sure you can see why Catwalk is probably better than most of my games. Because I was that developer who inserted themselves into the role of the gamer. With other games before it, it often felt like I was adding features until the deadline and wouldn't have enough time to play-test it.

Now with more time, I often focus a lot more on play-testing and getting into the worlds and fleshing them out.

Similarly with RedBlue, when I first play-tested it, it was incredibly boring - and using that knowledge I decided to make it a much more fun game.
I put in things like showing the amount of damage or even-out the difficulty a bit. Now, it's more fun to play.

And that's what developers never tell you about playtesting.
That's all from me!