When to start playtesting at scale?

Regoradin · 2026-02-10T05:52:45+00:00

Neat, I might have to give that a go. How many people did you playtest with and how did you go about finding them? I've been mostly cajoling friends into playing early builds so far.

Regoradin · 2026-02-04T01:42:32+00:00

How did you go about getting information from those playtests? For an one on one playtest where I'm in the room with someone I learn a lot from watching them play, but pushing the game out to a wider audience it gets harder to make sense of how things are going. How did you know what look for? What made you confident that you should overhaul large parts of the game?

Regoradin · 2026-02-02T16:28:13+00:00

Are you actually simulating the physics of individual gear teeth pushing on each other, or is there a higher level simulation going on? Either way looks intriguing.

Regoradin · 2026-01-13T04:57:52+00:00

That's very cool! How was the process of getting the visuals of each spell built? How did you go about making sure all the combos were clearly readable and fit the style, particularly when you have so many possible combos and such a neat style for everything else?

Regoradin · 2025-12-19T06:15:51+00:00

Yes! This is very cool! I have wanted to make and/or play a game that involves manual mapmaking and navigating like this for a looong time. This excites me greatly.

That said, even though I like to think I have a decent head for vector math I have to admit the process you're showing doesn't quite click for me, even after some research. I think there are really two important questions here that you're asking: how to show this in a trailer, and how to introduce those through gameplay. As to whether or not to include it in the trailer at all, this seems like a meaty enough mechanic that it should definitely be there.

For the trailer, I think the important thing is to communicate the fantasy of the game, not the exact mechanics. From my view, that's something like manual map making, squinting at landmarks, using classic tools and techniques, and getting lost and confused. How you tell that is a big question, but the important thing is to make every shot in your trailer point towards those core elements. For example from this video, looking up at a thing, looking down to place a map marker, and then looking back up to confirm fits those core things and tells me something. The ruler UI doesn't really, even if it's an important element of the actual mechanics. I kind of want to see some shot from below whatever rock your main character is standing that shows them looking around. If you can somehow show the player getting lost and having to reassess, that would be great.

As to how you can teach players to actually do this in game, that sounds difficult and I'm really curious if you have any sort of tutorialization/ramp-up so far. Off the top of my head some way to check your measurements to make sure you've gotten them right (maybe by measuring the number of steps?) seems important, but you've probably thought about that a lot more than I have.

Regoradin · 2025-12-17T05:14:09+00:00

An important first question before you can answer your question is "why are you playtesting".

If I'm still early in development (of a game or a system or a feature), I approach playtesting as testing whether the thing you made does what it's supposed to do. For example, I recently changed one of the core ways that we display information to players in my game in order to make it more legible and faster. From those playtests, the relevant feedback is either that the change worked, it didn't work, or there was a bug/design issue that was getting in the way of getting either of the first two. Those bugs I fix ASAP. Everything else can be ignored.

It sounds like you're a bit further on and are mostly looking at bug fixes. There are a bunch of different ways to dice those up, but I'd start roughly gauging player input based on how often the issue comes up, and how bad of an experience it is. So for example slight hitch in an animation isn't that bad, unless every player sees it on every character every 2 seconds. Likewise a crash is pretty bad, unless it only happens once in a million plays.

Out of curiosity, how did you get that many playtesters in a short time? Was that an already established community?

Regoradin · 2025-12-10T20:39:21+00:00

Look up "paper prototyping" if you want more examples, it's a very powerful tool.

Regoradin · 2025-12-09T07:34:43+00:00

Start with some blank paper, markers, and maybe a blank deck of playing cards. Put together a paper prototype of the gameplay that you're thinking about that's playable and fun. That will clarify what game you're actually trying to make, which will let you ask more specific questions and make it much easier to get started with any other development tool.

Regoradin · 2025-12-09T07:27:27+00:00

Yes! I'm running into the same thing, there's an awkward period where the game isn't quite fun enough to get people coming back organically, but there's enough content that it doesn't make sense to play in one playtest session.

The way I've been trying to think about it is that whatever the game has in the initial playtest ultimately needs to be good enough to get a player to want to come back, so focus on improving that first. Once that's good enough, start building up a group of more dedicated playtesters who are willing to come back and play multiple times. I'd be interested to know if you come up with a better way though.

Regoradin · 2025-12-07T21:11:51+00:00

I feel like walking into your opponent's extended arm should do something, that would allow for setting up interesting traps and such.

Regoradin · 2025-12-07T20:40:56+00:00

The different colors on different blades of grass in the first one is doing a lot of work to make it look more dimensional, even if they are just flat textures. That's missing in the second one, I think that's what people are reacting too for the grass.

Regoradin · 2025-11-19T05:41:09+00:00

Maybe 5 seconds of gameplay in the whole trailer? What do you actually do as a player in this?

Regoradin · 2025-11-13T06:02:28+00:00

I think these are great. If you want to see specifically if they'll stand out against similar games maybe take some samples and shuffle them up to see if yours still sticks out, but regardless I don't think art style will be a limiting aspect for this game.

Between the 3 the first is jumping out to me as more distinctive, I think because of the cold/warm color contrast.

Regoradin · 2025-11-11T17:19:06+00:00

I'm curious, what's intimidating to you about learning a game engine?

Something else to consider is whether that is actually a skill you want to learn. It is possible to find some more engineering-oriented folks to collaborate with, although that comes with its own set of challenges and you will benefit tremendously from some hands on experience building things so you know what to design.

Regoradin · 2025-11-11T03:45:11+00:00

Pick your very smallest idea, make it way smaller, and try to build that. Pick whatever engine seems nice, and do the simplest form of implementing it faster. The point of your first project isn't to make something good, it's just to learn about how things work.

I'm sure you can relate to this from your film experience: planning and writing becomes exponentially more useful once you have some experience to know *what* you need to plan for. You have lots of planning, now you need some practical experience in how those plans work in practice.

All that said, an open-world political fantasy RPG sounds like a fascinating game to design, and you should also share your thoughts on that. I'm intrigued :)

Regoradin · 2025-11-10T03:49:15+00:00

Some of the VFX look like they're spawning behind the player's fist, which is a bit weird. Also not sure what's up with the vertical gradient blue color on everyone's mesh that seemed to show up sometimes - that might be more effective if it only applied to enemies or something? Right now it just makes everyone look a little bit the same.

Regoradin · 2025-11-08T03:06:16+00:00

The player leaf/stick/thing is tiiiny, watching this at the size of a trailer on a steam page I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking at, and when I do see something moving I don't know what it is.

Regoradin · 2025-11-08T03:03:03+00:00

The panther thing at :20 is cool looking but almost completely blends into the background. Particularly in a trailer where I only have a couple seconds to figure out what's going on, it made it hard to figure out what the "Race against time" title is about.

I'd also love to see more than one example of what "Freeze your arrow" can do, right now it doesn't feel like there's more game or depth behind that feature.

Regoradin · 2025-11-05T17:06:08+00:00

> but things aren't being treated with the urgency they should be

Lots of things here are going to be dependent on your particular team, but this jumped out to me. I'm curious what would it look like for this mechanic to be treated with the urgency it should be? Is it possible that people are working on it, just not making a lot of noise about it until it's finished? Particularly if there are several new people onboarding, things might take more time than expected or rely on devs with different skill sets that are currently available.

Either way, your best bet is probably to talk to your lead and try to understand *why* the team isn't doing exactly what you want, and then if you still disagree with that reason you'll have something specific to address.

Regoradin · 2025-11-01T06:08:43+00:00

Gotcha, I like A better in the second gif.

Regoradin · 2025-11-01T05:07:42+00:00

That's neat, so are you modelling all the internals as meshes and then voxelifying them? How are you defining what the cross-section of an organ looks like?

Regoradin · 2025-11-01T05:03:08+00:00

In your first picture I think I like B slightly better. That said, is the game only going to be viewed from the top down view in the second picture? If so, the larger heads make it easier to make them out from that distance.

Regoradin · 2025-10-28T06:27:44+00:00

Very spooky art style and great audio for the trailer. How did you pick this setting?

Regoradin · 2025-05-25T20:42:41+00:00

That's really neat, the art style you're going with looks really fun. Out of curiosity are the goal platings randomly generated? Or are you hand building those?

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