Zach Young (also known as innercircus and the creator of BoomsticK) brings us a great article this week on the importance of beta-testing your game and improving it for your users. He shares advice and personal experience with BoomsticK below. Read on!

So you have made what your friends call “the best game ever”. Your brothers and sisters shower you with compliments at your technical savvy and you are on cloud nine thinking you just made the next Fancy Pants Adventures. You have shown the game to anyone who will look at it, even other developers who have given their input and technical advice.

So you get all your thumbnails, descriptions and emails together and send them, out in mass, waiting for the awards to trickle in. There’s only one problem. You’re getting bug complaints, piles and piles of suggestions and your beautiful game is falling off of the front pages of sites! So what went wrong? Why is your “best game ever” not doing so well? The answer is simple. The people who matter didn’t play your game. That seems harsh but it’s true.

Beta Testing Your Game

Beta testing is important for bug fixing and usability. However, there is an unseen facet of the testing process that goes unnoticed, the user experience factor. This is the factor in which you don’t get to sit next to every player and tell them how to play, where to click, what to do. If you are lucky you get a few lines of text (which to be honest maybe 25% of people actually read) to explain your masterpiece. So while your first test group of family and friends get your wonderful direction, the masses do not. If you are going to make the most of out your friends and family, I highly recommend checking out this article by Ron Carmel of 2DBoy.com. It’s a quick read and has great tips for making the most out of the people closest to you in regards to playtesting.

The next test group you tried was other developers. I place myself in this category so I hope other developers don’t flame me for saying this but, we are jaded! We assume you are going to “finish” the game like we would, or that you will take our pearls of wisdom to heart. The fact is, developers are not the best people to show your game too because often times we don’t play every game out there, and we tend to gravitate towards our own preferences and practices. That isn’t to say we don’t have good input, and I really am not attacking developers (I’m one of them!). Just something to keep in mind when you ask for what developers think of your game.

So whose voice really counts? The end users of course! That seems like a no brainer. However often times I think developers find themselves shaking their heads and wondering why their game isn’t received better. It is easy to call a game “done” when it is live on a few sites. We would all like to think we nail the game play, controls and fix all the bugs right off of the bat. However, there is much to be said about some degree of iteration. Most portals have reviews that are EXTREMELY useful. For example, you might get a few people saying “it’s too hard”. Maybe you take that with a grain of salt. On the other hand, maybe you get a lot more people complaining the boss at the end is too easy. It’s a recurring theme, “Great game, but the end is easy”. If you read this in more than a few posts, you should probably look at that.

More often than not, end users also have their “preferences” which may get in the way of them enjoying your game. However, if their small requests aren’t too hard and won’t break anything, put them in! If you didn’t make “p” pause and they want it, well give it to them! If they wish they could mute the game and you didn’t make that button, well, put it in! These small things can add up in the grand scheme of your game.

Experiences with BoomsticK

A personal example of this happened when I thought I was “done” with BoomsticK. Originally the game made you start over from the first tier if you died. The game in general was much more difficult and while I thought it was an absolute blast to play, I kept hearing the same things. “I can’t get past Tier 5!” or “Man I was having a great time till I had to start over!” Again and again these issues came up. I found them harder and harder to ignore. So I reevaluated my masterpiece and through several iterations with different test groups on several sites, I found the changes I made were making the game much more enjoyable for more people. While I can beat the game with my eyes closed many others found the challenge level much more engaging. I realized then I can begin by making a game for me, but I must end by making a game for everyone, if I want it to be successful.

While I feel I did an adequate job at fixing BoomsticK, I am guilty of ignoring lots of very valuable feedback for several reasons. The first is that BoomsticK was my first web based game and it was created more out of a “test scenario” than a business scenario. The second is I found that after the game released, I was swamped with day job work and found it increasingly difficult to take the time to really fine tune it. However, I did take note of most of the larger issues and have since made several new versions and tried to update them on every portal I had submitted to. Since this was such a pain to update all of the portals, I sort of came up with a little iteration process idea and fully plan to implement it on my next project.