Playtesting

We're entering the play-testing phase of our game development, which is rather nerve-wracking.  There's a lot at stake: is my game playable?  Is it fun?  Most importantly, is it broken and does it need to be fixed?

I started play testing in my Game Design class, where it became apparent that some drastic rule changes needed to occur.  Someone won in the first round!  That was no good.  There was also the matter of a trading mechanic I included in the first iteration that was rather spotty.  Fixing all this was easy: to keep play from ending prematurely, I changed it so that, instead of starting with a hand of cards, players started by drawing from the full deck.  I got rid of the trading mechanic and combined a shoddy battle mechanic with another card, the Operational Spy card.

The next opportunity for play testing was Game Design club, where there would be a lot of upperclassmen and people from other sections.  Here, feedback was generally positive; aside from the odd overpowered card, the only main criticism was that gameplay took too long.  This was due to not having enough of certain needed cards.  I fixed this by adding in more organs, and fixing the overpowered card by making it half as effective.

In Game Design class, though, I got a shocking awakening: the game was based too much on chance; dice rolls, random card picking, etc.  It was fun, though that was like saying the cake was awful but the store-bought icing pretty good. In order to have more strategy, I needed to change the game once more.

I brought back trading, but made it a main focus of the game, adding a bluffing mechanic and dividing up event cards in a good and bad deck.  I also added in roles and a variety of win states, and introduced the idea of undesirable cards.

This new iteration's been play tested once, and there was definitely things to fix, but I'm not going to call it quits.  There's still a lot of play testing to be done before my game is ready to be released onto the world.