Discover the essentials of effective game playtesting, including when and how to conduct it to ensure player enjoyment and game design success.
This course dives deep into the vital role of playtesting in game design. You'll learn how to arrange, conduct, and analyze playtests to create enjoyable games that resonate with your audience. It’s all about understanding what makes a game tick!
Playtesting: when, how, why, what to do (and not do)
This is an in-depth treatment of what's important, and how to effectively conduct and benefit from, game playtesting. Translating the 6.5 hours of videos to words, it's the size of a small novel (more than 50,000 words). To my knowledge, there is nothing approaching this size on this subject in existence.
Playtesting is the heart (though not the brains) of game design. If you want to be a good game designer, not just a hack, you have to understand that heart just as you have to understand the brains, as covered in my other courses.
The major sections cover:
What is Playtesting?
Arranging the Playtesting
How to Conduct Playtesting
How to use the results of Playtesting
Other Considerations when Playtesting
There is nothing here about game programming, art, sound, etc. It is all about game design.
Understand that there's a lot more to playtesting than just playing the prototype
Recognize that playtesting is not only about fixing problems, it's about ensuring your target market enjoys the game
Know what you can do to more efficiently arrange playtesting
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3 Lectures
Dr. Lewis Pulsipher (Wikipedia: "Lewis Pulsipher"; "Britannia (board game)"; "Archomental" ) is the designer of approaching a dozen commercially published boardgames. His game "Britannia" is described in an Armchair General review "as one of the great titles in the world of games." Britannia was also one of the 100 games highlighted in the book "Hobby Games: the 100 Best". He...
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Immo S.
ĂŽ have two criticisms at this point: One: It is just a series of slides read out by the author. Two: The author spends a lot of time on stuff that is not important to the target audience. For example, the author lists a long list of reasons why playtesting is important. I just spend 26 bucks on it. I do not need to be convinced about the importance. I want to learn. However, the author seems to be knowledgeable, given his credentials. The slide design and his age leads me to believe that he may be out of touch with the current game developement culture.