The Monday Mood: How Are We Feeling After Game Testing?

Last Friday, we completed phase 1 testing for our Catty Liberal prototype deck. We had 10 different groups of friends and associates play Catty Liberal over a 2 week period, leaving us with plenty of feedback. 

So, how are we feeling? 

We're feeling haaaaapppppyyyy! 

And, why are we happy?

We're happy because we've learned a lot about game development and design in a short period of time. Below are some things we picked up: 

1) It's important to have a cohesive theme. 

Our testers really like the political theme of Catty Liberal, which is fantastic! However, they want to see the political theme incorporated more into the deck (completely understandable).

Although we had to use generic shapes/images to create the prototype deck for phase 1 game testing, it's clear that we should continue to focus on the theme as we create new illustrations for the cards. 

Bye bye generic shapes! 

**Side note: We think best practice is to lock down your game's rules and overall game play first. We're happy that we didn't send our game testers a completely designed deck as we do not know what changes we'll want to make in the future. No reason to spend money on designs and illustrations that may not be used in the final version...With that said, give folks just enough illustrations so that they can begin to visualize a final product and give good suggestions.**

2) It's important to have a variety of game testers. 

To see if your game is working, test it out on a variety of people. For example, some of our testers were more "chill" and looking for quick, easy fun, while other testers were more "intense" and looking for more ways to implement hardcore strategy during game play. The feedback from both groups was invaluable and showed us that we need to try and meet future customers somewhere in the middle. 

Bonus points for testing your game on folks from different backgrounds and age ranges. 

3) It's important to define what "a turn" looks like in your game. 

We wrote and rewrote the rules to Catty Liberal, attempting to make gameplay less confusing. Yet, we still failed to define "a turn" in the rules for players. This created some confusion with our game testers, who weren't sure how many cards they could use during a turn and when their turn was officially over. 

Lucky for us, we read the early feedback from our game testers and updated our rules to help with their experience. 

4) It's important to keep players in mind when making game design choices. 

There's a reason why Bicycle playing cards have icons in the corners. As people are playing your card game, you want them to be able to understand their dealt hand and card options easily. 

Honestly, we learned so much with our first prototype deck. In the future, we'll continue to share additional game development tips with you. 

For now, it's back to building on what we've created so far. :)