we made a sort of-working demo.

We haven’t said much about our current game, yet. It’s on its way.

We really wanted to get some player eyes on what we have so far, but didn’t know where to start.

how did we get there?

We sat down and made a list. It wasn’t a perfect list; we added extra things and half-assed others.

But we did finish it.

We decided this was a state we were okay with having maybe one or two people see. Little did we know!

what we learned.

The goal of our demo was to have a first round of playtesting to determine whether this game really is viable and how easy it is to pick up as-is. It turned out to be a little more than that.

Our play tester was great at finding bugs and untested behavior. We realized that we’ve only been playing our game by the rules, which means we missed a lot of edge cases.

There may be different goals for a play test. You could be hunting for bugs, you could be testing the balance or progression, you could be checking the readability. All of that information is useful, but it helps to let your play tester know what your focus is, especially in the early stages where there’s a lot of room for feedback.

get ready for more work.

One of the big takeaways is that we still have a lot of work to do. There are a lot of ideas we would still like to implement, and apparently still plenty of bugs to fix.

We are planning to polish our demo up before having it play tested again. Eventually, we hope to release something that could be played by a small group.

this was a good experience.

By having even a single person play through our game, we gathered insight we may never have received by playing it on our own.

Putting public/private playtests and demos into the development cycle was a good idea for us, and we’ll be using it more often.

See you then…