Playtesting during the pandemic

Team Producer Chris here

This past year has been very difficult for all of us, and it presented our team with some serious issues. Developing a small student indie game without a following, it's hard enough to get people willing to playtest your game and give valuable feedback. With everyone staying inside and no public gatherings, the typical "free slice of pizza" random events and asking random people if they have time to play strategies no longer work. We had to move to this platform much earlier than originally planned, and our style of information gathering had to change drastically.

Getting Online

Moving to itch.io was the first step in our transition. By moving here we could reach anyone in the world with a compatible PC, the new issue was finding people that want to download and try it, and then give us information. We started a discord server and twitter account to try and put our name out there, tweeting about every new build or milestone. Through this we were able to get some really cool people from around the world to play our game. Looking back I would've also started a TikTok account at the same time to show off some gameplay as the service really lends itself to indie game promotion. 

Establishing Presence

When you start promoting online through social media you have to be consistent. Even if the content isn't that good, if you can consistently give updates you give people what they can expect from you. This helps people retain interest in your project and builds a community. We didn't do this well enough so we only got random interactions once or twice with people by chance. This made it hard to gather playtesting results consistently and required us to work on other methods of gathering this information. 

Bug Everyone

Living at home? Get your family to playtest. Moved out and have roommates? Get them to. Have friends who play games? Bug them to play your game. If they're legit friends they will play it. You aren't being toxic. Seriously though, you have to ask everyone you can to playtest and try to get in a rotation of people who are willing to. It's not a good idea to have someone playtest it each time because they won't be the fresh eyes you need after just 1 or 2 sessions. Try your best to include people in your target demographic, but be open to letting very different demographics playtest as well. Your grandparents might just show you a game breaking bug you had no idea existed, but had been there since the first week of prototyping. 

Keep it Simple, Stupid

Last but certainly not least, set up gathering information in a way that is painfully obvious to people playing your game. We made it so that when the game closes it immediately opens a google form survey in the preferred browser of whoever was playing. This made it impossible for people playing our game to miss giving us information, and increased our random playtest results from 10% to around 85%. Do this if you want your playtests to amount to anything. You have to make it impossible to miss, or people will avoid giving you the feedback you need to improve your game. Also, make sure you're asking questions that are important and let the user provide valuable feedback. DO NOT waste their time. Keep it simple and let them give you what they want to give.

Hope this helps anyone in a similar spot!