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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8204532" data-attributes="member: 71699"><p><h2>Game Quality is Proportional to Playtest Cycles</h2><p>There is an assumption here that each playtest cycle encompasses an iteration of revision (after all, why playtest if you can't or won't change anything?) Games with more playtest and revision iterations are typically far higher quality that those with less. Good case studies for this can be found in the histories of Nintendo, Half-life, Minecraft, D&D, Cosmic Encounters, and many, many more. The passion of the designer for their game is frequently crucial in driving sufficient playtest cycles. In a sense, this law is a statement of the obvious: more refinement leads to a game being more refined. Games are never perfected - opportunities to notice and make improvements are open-ended - so it is important to be sensitive to the efficiency of your playtest cycles. Which leads into an important corollary -</p><h3>The More Efficient Your Playtest Cycles, the More Feasible it is to Achieve Higher Quality</h3><p>This is why methodically developing your test pipeline is critically valuable in game development. Recruiting and engaging players who represent your audience. Having an efficient way to supply them with prototypes, encourage them to play, and then to collect and analyse feedback. You will hear this emphasised by 5th Edition designers in conference streams: they took a very deliberate approach to recruiting cohorts of players, supplying them drafts of the rules, collecting their responses through online survey tools, and analysing those responses.</p><p></p><p>I suspect a characteristic shared by many successful game designers is their ability to set up and drive playtesting, and willingness to revise. It gives their games an edge, all else being equal. That's worth pointing out because superficially it can feel like great design is all on the creative side - the outpouring of ideas - whereas many of our most cherished games were achieved as much by of the other side of the equation: the repeated testing and revision of those ideas. This leads to a few useful observations -</p><h4>Successful Game Designs Build on the Shoulders of Others</h4><p>Just as Minecraft built on Infiniminer, DOTA built on Warcraft, Pathfinder built on D&D, a game designer should thoroughly know their field. Other games are in a way the cheapest possible prototypes for your own game: they might have tried the rule you are thinking of and either shown how to solve it, or shown how current solutions are lacking... offering you an opportunity to finesse it. In a way, a game built on the shoulders of another, is just another iteration of test and revise! The first question to ask yourself when thinking about a new design is - what else is out there already that is like what I am thinking of?</p><h4>Games that are Inherently Easier to Revise have an Edge</h4><p>Magic the Gathering was simply super-easy to revise, permitting rapid cycles of playtest and revision.</p><h4>The Most Important Factor in Game Design is Empathy with Your Audience: Solving Problems They Care About in a Way that is Better Than and Easily Differentiable from Current Solutions</h4><p>I think PbtA is an excellent example of this. It was designed by passionate gamers who <em>intuitively</em> noticed an opportunity to solve a problem for their RPG playing audience (and themselves!) in a fresh way. It turns out that game designer as representative of game player can end up delivering some pretty good games. The reason in a word is <em>empathy</em>. </p><p></p><p>This observation also tilts toward commercial design. One way of putting the work of a designer is that we design things for use. So it is vital to appreciate the use of the things we design and thus vital to empathise with the users of those things. Completing the circuit - it turns out to help if we ourselves are one of those users. However, a difference between amateur and professional design is that the latter may be paid to adopt an audience, while the former are frequently already in that audience.</p></blockquote><p></p>

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