Circus Train - Playtesting (continued)

4. The Upward Turn – “We can rebuild the game. We have the technology. We can make it better, stronger, faster.”

After coming to grips with all of the above stages, my head cleared and I was starting to think of all the ways this game can be improved. I couldn’t stop thinking about all of the problems being noted and my mind whirled at their likely solutions.

Ah, this is starting to get fun! I was back from the funk of coping with the preceding stages to the exhilaration of being the game’s designer once again. It was great to be coming up with more cool ideas and mechanics. It was a joy to be solving design puzzles to improve the game in much the same ways as players should enjoy solving the game’s puzzles when they sit down to play it.

However, this is also a most dangerous time. I had to be careful not to overreact to any particular feedback. One must use great care and discernment, because a good game developer must make sure that every change made holds up and is truly necessary. The game is teetering now on greatness, but could also fall back into ruin; decisions here are critical.

It is important to remember that feedback is there to help you, not to dictate to you.

5. Acceptance – “Not everyone will like my game.”

It really is okay if someone doesn’t like my game. Not everyone will, and that is pretty much guaranteed. Obviously, I want to make the game as great as possible with a broad appeal, but there are going to be detractors; it’s impossible to create the one game that suits everyone.

Even in the elite gamer community of Boardgame Geek on the internet, the top-rated game there, Agricola, has over three pages of “1” ratings (the lowest, on a 10-scale) with one comment that reads, “I’d rather have a root canal than play this [game].”

With that thought in mind, it is much easier to go forward and make the best possible game and let the critics have the hind quarters. (Sometimes critics and hind quarters have much in common anyway.)

If you like the kind of game you’re making, and you make it well, then plenty of others should like it too.

6. Challenge – “I don’t have to change everything.”

To a game’s developer, the playtesting process becomes one giant puzzle that (hopefully) only needs the final pieces to be put together for completion. The edge pieces are all there and the picture parts are all in – that is what makes a playable game prototype in the first place. If the game is pretty solid to start with, then all that is needed to finish up are the sky and trees of the puzzle. So, I try to stay focused and realize that I don’t have to take the whole puzzle apart to complete it. I just need to fit those final pieces into this game development puzzle and it will be completed.

With that in mind, I assemble all my notes and put together a new iteration of the game; one that addresses what I believe are the important issues raised in as clever and comprehensive way as possible, yet retains the game’s identity. It will still be the Circus Train that I have created; it won’t be a whole new game, just an improved one that has replaced and upgraded the weaker parts.

In the end, I must remember that I know as much as any other tester as to what is working and what isn’t, and it’s up to me to make the final judgment about the rough spots that the playtesters have pointed out and make my own decisions concerning what needs to be done with them.

The playtesters are the authors of ideas now, and the developer is their editor. This stage is about cooperative composition, but the editor makes the final arrangements.

7. Reiteration – “I will have to fix and re-test my game over and over again until I get it right.”

Not every change I make is going to fix the problem the first time… or the second (or maybe not even the third or fourth). I’m in this stage with Circus Train right now. Some problems suggest their own solutions, while some solutions present their own problems! When does it end? When it’s ready, obviously; when the problems seem as sorted out and tamped down as they can be.

Games are never finished, only published. You can’t make a game perfect, and so have to settle for “the best you can make them” and be satisfied with that.

I want to thank all the Circus Train testers who have given such fantastic feedback so far. I hope we’ll put together a product that you can be proud to have been a part of when it’s all done. And with that, I’ll go check my emails to find out, “Oh no! Someone else hates my game now?”

Tom Decker