Play Testing

Gamespot has a nice series of interviews with Valve's staff from the teams of Half Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal.

Valve are one of the greatest contemporary game developers who consistently produce top quality games. Their cabal structure and iterative playtesting should be seriously considered as a development model.

"We start with a statement of the design goals for a small section of the game and try to keep the pure design phase very short, preferring an imperfect prototype to a perfect design. As soon as we have that imperfect prototype, we play-test it to see if it achieves its goals. If the experience is fun even in prototype form we know we're onto something. If our early play tests yield ideas for ways to improve the prototype, we try a few of those and then test again as soon as possible.

So the heart of our design process is very iterative and everyone from the cabal watches every play test to apply their expertise to the game experience."

"Robin Walker: Balancing is an iterative process. We watch many, many play tests, and use automatic systems to gather all the underlying data."

"Tell us about how you managed the progression of difficulty without making the game frustrating.

Play testing, play testing, play testing. Every week during development, we would bring in someone new to play the game from start to finish. We wouldn't just have them fill out a questionnaire at the end of the game, but we'd watch them play through. There is so much value watching someone play the game."

"One of us would quickly get the map up and running in a few days, and then we'd get someone who had never seen it before to play through. Based on our observations from the play test, we'd readdress the map, make any alterations that everyone agrees on, and run another play tester through. Rinse and repeat!"