Playtest Organization
What is it?
My team and I were making a FPS game. For further improvements, we needed playtest to spot our game weaknesses. After hiring playtesters, test sessions began.
My goal was to collect informations talking with and watching playtesters. I needed first to design my own evalutation table and to set the game's editorial target.
Credits to: Arthur JAMES, Loïc LECOMTE, Paul ARTIGE, Lucas DZIURA, Morgan CAMENEN, Victor GIROUX, Jonas FELIX and Jorys ABADIE for the FPS game they made with me.
Evaluation table
The evaluation table is made to know if playtesters are near to the game's editorial target.
The problematic is: testers are all different and if one tells you A and the other B, how to choose who to listen to ?
The evaluation table is based on Quantic Foundry's Gamer Motivation Model (GMM). After or before a test session (depending on what kind of test I wanted to do), I asked testers to fill the GMM survey and get their results. These results enable me to classified feedback from less to hyper relevant and to improve the game in consequences.
In this case, we decided that the editorial target have Major Motivation: Excitement and Destruction and in Minor Motivation: Story
Here's a look of what the table looks like:
Data collection
Datas were collect using three methods: observation, questions and heatmaps analysis.
Obervations occur when the testers is playing. It consists on watching player's reactions and record/note them.
Question datas were collect from simple questions on each part of the game that need to be tested: movement, gun feel, aiming experience, navigation and enemies.
When testers are playing, datas of their gameplay were recorded on various heatmaps. Datas were about: Where did the player take damage ? Where did the player deal damage ? Where did the player use his skills ? Where did the player go ?
Analyzing those heatmaps permited us to focus more precisely on level pacing, enemies balancing and on the critical path.
Heatmaps looks like that without the level background:
