Testing First Playable
Like expectant Fathers, the team of Paydirt Games waited on the distilled test results of our first fully-playable product with actual video game players of all kinds. Nine months in development, 40K+ lines of code but (ultimately) many years in gestation. Dozens of self-described video gamers of all appetites and ages arrived during a frenetic 10day period for a full day of play testing, providing individual feedback and group feedback on what was good, bad (& ugly).
Testing was structured through the days in three sessions: Start with the narrative-driven Tutorial (‘Story Mode’) driving the player through diverse Quests teaching all the core gameplay loops and systems. Next came the competitive play where up to six players competed in their group to harvest as many resources as possible, with the winners celebrated at the end. Then came the final session, testing players’ appetite to engage in a free-style (free-range?) mode of play where they were progressively rewarded for exploration, survival and resource gathering. The catch? They needed to pay a modest amount of their own money to acquire their in-game avatar, together with equipment, before the game session commenced. As innocuous as that sounds, this was a critical test of video gamers’ appetite to engage with the Paydirt Games’ core innovation, testing our design thesis: Will video game players respond positively to new forms of ‘rewarded play’ with rewards driven by diverse performance criteria within a complex skill-based video game environment? More than ninety per cent (>90%) of Focus Group participants elected to spend their own money to participate in this final session, validating the thesis amongst a substantial group of self-described cross-genre video gamers aged between 18years and 60years, two-thirds male. Moreover, 85% of all participants stated “They would recommend this interactive entertainment experience to their friends” (which is easy to say, but super-comforting to hear).
So … a collective sigh of relief. It appears we didn’t spend ~9months wasting our time (and shareholder capital). We ‘found the fun’ first time out, which speaks to the caliber of the core developers and their track records. We also validated the historical aspect, focusing on the age of pioneers and explorers of North America’s fringes throughout the 19th century, with many commenting “I enjoyed the lore” and “it was immersive from the beginning”.
After some congratulatory back-slapping (well deserved by the team) we soberly assessed participants’ constructive feedback (i.e. the less good). Thankfully it was largely benign in nature. Yes, we needed a fuller inventory management system … yes, we needed hot swapping of items in-play … yes, we knew there were a bunch of nits needing attention. All have now been implemented in the Nov/Dec pre-Holiday weeks since wrapping the Focus Group testing. Next up: The extension of the F2P features and economy and the coupling of that economy to the conjoined rewards systems designed to deliver our thesis: Real-world rewards can and should form part of a highly skillful interactive entertainment experience designed specifically for adults to trigger the ‘side hustle’ demand driver as a way of enhancing the experience.
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/onwards
Wade Tormstrom © Paydirt Games, Inc. 2024
