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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 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.
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.
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.
So how can you achieve an iterative process in a market where there are literally hundreds of games a week and it feels like you have to deliver something as soon as possible? Well I must admit that after I had come up with my little iterative process, I ran across this awesome article “Promoting your game: Lessons Learned” by Axcho which I found fascinating since it seems we both arrived at very similar conclusions. I have also seen tidbits of these ideas in several other articles on MochiLand such as “Marketing Flash Games: The Other Half of the Battle”, and great ideas even touched on in “The Filler Sponsorship Rundown: Why I’m glad I kept distribution rights”. The bottom line is there is a lot of really good information out there and it seems like people are really putting it all together. So on to my little iterative process.
Step 1: Finish your game
Get your game to that state where you think you have nothing left to do on it. Play it a million times and then play it again. Show it off to your friends and family and fix whatever they find. This step is important because it will later allow you to gauge how close you really were to being “done”. It’s probably a good idea to save a backup copy of your work here to, for future comparison.
Step 2: Pick a portal with dynamic uploading and user feedback system
Once your game is anywhere, people are going to steal it and put it on their website. However, don’t concern yourself with all of that now (especially if you’ve taken the time to put MochiAds and MochiBot in your game, which you should!) The big thing is to make sure your game is on a portal that lets YOU update it and has user reviews or comments. This allows you to iterate your game immediately as the comments come in.
Step 3: Work on the game for another week
Plan to spend a good four to five days doing this. You will be amazed at how much cleaner and bug free your masterpiece is becoming. Allowing for a reasonable amount of time to get and evaluate feedback will allow you the time to fix and address all the little and maybe some of the big issues that pop up with your game.
Step 4: Pull the trigger
Now you are ready to “pull the trigger” so to speak. Get your thumbnails and description assets together along with the comfort of knowing that your game is that much better than it was a week ago. You definitely have a better shot at higher ratings and hopefully a longer shelf life for your game as a side effect. I highly recommend before you pull the trigger, read James Robinsons article “Marketing Flash Games: The Other Half of the Battle”.
So why is this process important? If you want to get the most out of your hard work, the last 10% of the game development can be the difference between just another game, and the next big thing. This last part of the development cycle can seem like an insurmountable hill that is dooming the horizon. Especially after you have worked on it for the past month and are really quite sick of looking at it. However, many times this last extra push can set you apart from the ten other games released that day.
In conclusion, it is the end user who determines how popular your game is. No amount of time spent coding or creating assets will change that. If you continue to work in a box, you will be bound to the size of that box. Testing and improving your game along the way can drastically increase your odds of success. If your game rates high, you stay on the front page, if it’s low, well, it gets lost in the sea of content released every day. So while the Masses maybe hard to listen to, they are always “Right”.
-Zach Young
4.16.08 |
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