A core tenant of game development is playtesting. You must playtest a lot in order to refine ideas, improve the flow of play, gain insight and new perspectives, and to simply make sure what you have is fun.

As fun as it is to play something you’ve created, playtesting is hard. First off, it needs other people to work well; solo playtesting can only take you so far. It also requires you to be observant, to watch, listen, and take notes on how your other players interact with the game – both overtly and indirectly. And then you also have to listen to your player’s thoughts about their experience with the game, what they liked, what they didn’t like, their praises, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement.

I will leave the specific things I watch for, the questions I ask, and the feedback I try to elicit from my playtesters for another article – the topic I want to focus on here is how to take that feedback and use it to effectively improve your game. This article is about optimizing your playtesting process, tracking and evaluating the changes you make as your game goes through its iterations, identifying core problems and the relative merits of possible solutions, and limiting the frequency that you see the same comments or complaints coming up over and over again.

But first, lets talk about:

Taking Notes

ALWAYS bring your notepad to a playtest, and take notes while the game is happening. If you leave it until the end, or only take notes on the post-game comments, or leave it until later, you will forget. You will lose context, you will forget some of the important things that happened, and you will not get as much value out of the playtest as you could have. Playtesting involves a significant investment of time, often more than actual development. Make sure you get as much value out of it as you can.

Unless your game is very small and plays quickly, start by tracking each playtest on a fresh sheet of paper by logging the following information: