to see if the changes fix an existing problem or break the game in some major way. A
designer may also direct his testers to try crazy and illogical ways of playing the game,
to see if the game breaks under those circumstances. What may seem like a foolish way
to play the game to you or even the tester may well be a style many players will try to
use when playing the final product. More experienced testers know to keep trying
every play style they can imagine when testing the game.
It is essential to allow and encourage your testers to do unguided testing as well.
Give them the game, tell them to start playing it, observe what they do, and listen to
their feedback. Many designers make the mistake of using only guided testing, usually
having the testers test only the system on which they are currently working. When the
testers bring up complaints about some other portion of the game, the designer will
complain that he is not interested in working on that now, or that the problematic part of
the game is already “done.” Directed testing has its place, but if it is all the designer
ever does, then he is likely to miss larger problems in the game that he may not have
even realized were problematic. Undirected testing gives the designer feedback about
the game holistically, something that is essential to resolving all of its problems.
Of course, even when you do direct your testers to test only a certain section of
your game, often they will not be able to resist pointing out the other problems they see
along the way. It takes an extremely disciplined tester to truly test only the system that
the designer requests. Getting feedback on parts of the game that you are not currently
working on may be frustrating but can be useful in the long run. When testers give you
off-topic suggestions about how to improve the game, even if you do not want to
address those issues immediately, be careful to take note of them to come back to later.
Nothing is more frustrating than recognizing a problem in the game after it has shipped,
only to realize that one of your testers had told you about the problem in plenty of time
to fix it.
Balancing...................................
The only time you can properly balance a game is when most of the game is done. Bal-
ancing your game ahead of time, before all of the gameplay is working and all the levels,
if any, are made, can only be considered to be preliminary balancing. Preliminary bal-
ancing can be very valuable, however, and you will want to do it just to get your game
fun as early as possible, with the full knowledge that you will need to adjust it later. That
said, you cannot truly get a sense for how the entire game needs to function and how
the difficulty must escalate over the course of the entire game until the game’s content
is complete. You can view your game as a collection of different systems that make up
one large system. For a level-based game, each level can be considered to be a system
in itself. Then, within each level, each combat encounter or puzzle can be considered to
be a system. In order for the game to be balanced, all of these systems must be in place,
since changing one system impacts how the other systems must be set up in order to
achieve the overall balance you are seeking. At the same time, if you wait for all the sys-
tems to be final and some are running behind, you may well run out of time to get the
game as balanced as you want. For example, onThe Suffering, too many aspects of the
levels were not completed until quite late in development, and as a result balancing was
put off until it was too late to do it to the quality level we would have liked. Starting
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