We are playtesting quite a bit with a small group of people multiple times a week, especially the last week, we changed a big portion of the game to make it a bit more unique. Hopefully we won’t need to have any more big changes like that, but the change was a real game changer. Pardon the pun…
How are we playtesting?
That is a good question! One of our team members, Tristan, is freelance web developer. And he created an online dice throwing web application, where we have full control about what happens and how many dice, and some other settings.
It also works very good on a mobile phone. You can just load it on your phone and all the dice throws will be synced between phones or desktop.
An other tool we use, to play with cards and the tokens, is a collaboration design tool called Figma. It’s free to use and you are able to have multiple people manipulating the cards as well. So we have one page called latest version, so all new ideas and art gets copied there, along with rule changes. That way we can figure out which rules work and which don’t.
And the beauty is, you can simply change everything around, to test a new idea takes about half an hour to setup and then we can play it to see whether it is a good idea or not.
That’s one thing I learned as UX Designer, kill your darlings, don’t be afraid to kill something if it doesn’t work. Prototype quickly and find out what works and what doesn’t.
The game also features some 30 action/event cards which you can draw randomly. So for testing a stack of cards for random drawing, we made a test in playingcards.io but to change things was a bit cumbersome with our workflow. You could use CSV files to do it, but we don’t really use that as well. So setting up a special excel to use for playingcards.io was a bit too much. Now we use a random sequence set generator to find out when someone draws a card which one they get. We put the cards in a grid, to a side portion of the screen and use an online generator to help us with the randomness.