Testing a game is an essential and integral part of the design process.

I didn’t do enough of it.

End of post!

Just kidding, of course. About the end of the post, I definitely did not do enough testing.

Even with the limited testing I did have though, I learned a lot about the process.

One of my challenges was that the majority of my testing was done online. Admittedly, this time around I chickened out of doing a couple of in-person tests. I’ve never been great at asking people to sacrifice their time to do stuff for me, and a small part of fear of having to face people physically who hated the game miiiight have played a small part. It’s something I hope I can rectify in the future.

I quickly realized that testing a physical game over Discord and Zoom chats presented some challenges. I don’t think I appreciated with a physical game how much being able to pick up objects and documents at a whim played a part in the experience.

For example, I had the one puzzle which involved placing a ring on a piece of paper to look like the number 8. In the couple of in-person tests I managed, it was one of the first puzzles solved. In the digital tests though, where I used photos to demonstrate the different stages of the puzzle, it was one of the puzzles players struggled most with. My testers confirmed that the ability to physically hold the ring and manipulate it seemed to make all the difference to figure out what to do with it.

Another challenge for me was learning how to listen to my testers, who were not always verbose. I tend to forget that I am a verbal processor, meaning I best process thoughts by talking them out loud. This kind of makes me an ideal in-person beta tester because I am constantly talking through my thought process. Not everyone best thinks this way though, with many trying to think of solutions purely in their head. It made me realize I would have to be better at listening to not just their verbal cues, but any visual cues as well, or to be better able to sense their emotions while solving. Was it taking too long? Were they too frustrated? I don’t know that I did the best job with it, but I did learn.

I also need to try and think of better ways to ask questions post-testing to see what people thought. Asking in the moment is kind of a double edged sword. On the one hand, that is when memories are freshest. On the other, letting the experience sink in so that the tester can parse out why they might have struggled with certain puzzles is very beneficial as well. What I had to manage most during this process was my own anxiety, accepting that someone not being able to articulate what they thought was not necessarily a bad thing.

There was a lot of great stuff though that came out purely from the testing process. The biggest of these things was working out my hinting. Originally, the UV light in the game was used purely for one puzzle. But of course, what does someone do when presented with a fun purple light that reveals secret messages? Shine it on everything they can. I wanted to reward that fun and curiousity. Combine this with players wondering where to place objects or me wondering where I can put a morse code legend, and the solution presented itself. The UV light could be used to help clue players on how to solve puzzles. This ended up making all the difference.

Overall, it was a good experience testing out my first game. There is a lot I would do differently, and hopefully future games I will be a testing machine!

Test your games, everyone. It’s important.