How a Playtest Changed my Game Forever
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- Опубликовано: 3 май 2024
- Ever wondered how player insights can change a game's development? Today we're going to take a deep dive into a critical playtest I hosted for my brand new game, Potion Shop Simulator!
Check out Potion Shop Simulator on Steam ! :
store.steampowered.com/app/27...
Make sure to subscribe and hit the bell to stay updated on this journey. Have any thoughts or questions about game development? Drop them in the comments below-I love connecting with fellow gamers and developers!
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Check out the Potion Shop Discord !
/ discord
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Edited by tokyo:
/ it6kyo
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Thanks for Watching! 
Развлечения
Check out Potion Shop Simulator on Steam!
store.steampowered.com/app/2788920/Potion_Shop_Simulator/
The frog should let you know every time it is wednesday my dudes.
HAAARRRRHHHHH
And because its a game you get to do the screams if you want to.
For brewing minigames, how about stoking the fire to a specific heat? The closer you are to the target heat, the faster it brews, but go too far over and the potion burns/evaporates? It still brews without heat, just noticably slower. This could then play together with some later game potions having longer "base" brewing speeds.
Good idea! We have something like it, that we are playing with currently. A bellows minigame where different potions has different patterns for the heat levels needed. But the burning is a good idea!
Hey, so I am just starting game development but i have a wife who is extremely sensitive to motion sickness. The more she can keep the camera still the better.
With the mini game, if you still wanted to keep it interactive, you could maybe temporarily lock the camera and just focus on the mouse movement. I think Palia's cooking mechanic was really impactful where you had to simply just hit the spacebar in a rhythm. Ultimately, if you want to try to avoid it feeling repetitive just for the sake of making the potion maybe you could add a bonus for how quickly or accurately they perform the minigame.
for example you could give the extra experience or maybe make the potion worth a small amount more. That way it feel like there is a reason you should perform the task and do it well.
I think these are great points, thank you for bringing that up!
Especially the feeling of it being impactful is important to us. I believe we'll be focusing on really expanding on the brewing, as we can see that being more of a key part of the game than we initially thought (we saw it on the same priority as shop keeping and plant keeping before playtesting)
The game looks fresh and unique. I love it. For the frog, I have a suggestion. Make the frog spew out a rare ingredient once per day. Or, have the frog in a liquid in the jar, let the frog swim in it and release pheromones in the liquid which can be extracted at the end of the night. This pheromone rich liquid can be used as a potion. You can expand this system by making a small pawning system where the customers can bring in rare creatures and can pawn it to the player in exchange of money or potions. You can use these rare creatures to get more potion ingredients. I am a game dev myself and I know how hard you guys are working. Keep going!
Super cool ideas! And appreciate the kind words 🙂
For brewing mini game you could take inspiration from the old Harry Potter games, where for spells you'd have specific patterns you need to trace. The brewing could have patterns you'd need to stir that are related to the contents.
Another idea (could be in combination with the first) is taking inspiration from rhythm games like Elite Beat Agents or Osu, and have some patterns be timed or connected to the potion becoming better, some kind of quality increase with a sound/visual effect that is connected to the rhythm part
Uhh that's cool!
Rythm games is actually also really interesting. No one has mentioned that I believe. That's definitely something to look into.
Seeing the before and after of how much the graphics changed over time was actually insane. Also, man this editor rocks!
The editor is alright I guess ;)
Just a suggestion:
When making potions have the character make potions by having all the ingredients in there inventory and then make an animation in a third person view having the character dropping all the ingredients and then a third person view of them stirring it in
Cool idea! Definitely something we'll be discussing
For the stirring mini game maybe lock the camera and unlock the mouse so players wouldnt have to turn their camera to stir and instead just spin the mouse in a circle
We thought about that actually. The only concern we had, was that we don't do anything like it anywhere else. We keep the free in the world during all interactions, so it might be odd to all of a sudden be locked. But I could be very wrong. Maybe we should play around with it.
@@BobsiDevlog Could make it an accessibility option for those that get sick or add in Hold Alt to lock camera and then test to see how many actually use it. Other places that you could use a locked camera could be: Turning pages in a book or writing/drawing on a custom sign.
@@TminusDoom Oh, interesting middle ground!
Regarding a potion minigame:
Id do something like for when youre cooking milk - you gotta pay close attention the milk doesnt “overcook” and splash out of the pot.
Of course, for milk, this is somewhat slow and very manageable, but what if you had to not leave it stationary so it doesnt overcook, but also not stir in the same direction for too long as that would make it overcook, requiring you to switch that up.
To make this less repetitive, the overcookyness of a given potion should vary - for some, you should be able to walk away and check on the cauldron occasionally (nice risk at play there), for some youll have to stir really good (those should be done much faster).
It would be good if there wasnt a boring bar but you could see the actual cauldron rising and foaming in the game world.
Thats what my first thought was just now.
Interesting idea. I especially like the idea of having the progress be visual within the cauldron. That's really cool!
I think the game looks really interesting and it's cool that you're transparent about your playtesting process, I think that's less common with developers. However, what I would say is that some of the methods here seem quite odd to me.
I think a lot of the questions you have in your surveys are inappropriate for the sample sizes that you're using. Asking things like 'is the game fun' is one of the most meaningless questions you can ask in a playtest survey and it's especially troublesome in the context of the small sample size. When thinking about the data you're collecting you should try to think about actionability, what does it tell you about the game and how you might change it. The best data, in a playtest is highly actionable.
I think it's important to emphasise that the purpose of playtesting is to ultimately de-risk the game development process, to reduce the number of unknowns you have in the game before you ship and more reliably ensure your games design aligns with your vision for the player experience. You do this by making iterative change from actionable data and I can see that's what you're going for here, but if you're asking the wrong questions and using the wrong sample size, then we're not able to achieve that goal of de-risking the process because the data is too volitile or doesn't answer questions in line with the key risks of the project.
As you're still at a stage where you're introducing new mechanics and features to the game the most valuable thing you could be doing is iterative usability testing where you use fine-grained observations on the players actual behaviour (rather than survey responses) to polish up the core features of the game and their interaction design. Subjective data (like you might get asking if the game was enjoyable) is very volatile but observational, behavioural data on usability and understanding is not. You can get incredible value from watching 5 players play your game and identifying points of friction or confusion, and it's important to do this type of work before you start asking questions like 'whether the game is fun', because otherwise appeal is confounded by these points of friction and they're not something that are expressed clearly by players in a survey format.
For some context I work in the games' industry as a games' user researcher and accessibility expert, so this area is totally my wheelhouse. While I don't have too much time spare if you want to ask any questions feel free to DM me on discord where you can find me under GungJoe. Otherwise, best of luck with the game.
Thank you very much! What a well written comment.
An important thing, it definitely that this isn't our first playtest. We had 3 playtests alone to just focus on the potion brewing and shop keeping mechanics (single mechanics).
This was just the "story" of our first playtest in our new environment. This change to the new environment was specifically interesting to us, as it was the first time the playtesters will have seen the game as "a game" and not as single mechanics thrown together.
We have a few "soft" questions, that we've kept consistent throughout every playtest, and we've seen those subjective matters move in the right direction for every playtest. One of these soft questions is indeed the "did you have fun?" questions.
This isn't meant as an actionable parameter, but an overview of the players perspective on what we're creating.
We also purposefully built a closed testing group with very different tastes in games, and some even strictly disliking the first person simulation genres. So we get very varied feedback, and we're able to communicate directly with our playtesters after we receive their feedback, in case we want to delve deeper into specific pieces of feedback.
It is also one of the points I bring up in the beginning, is our whole reason for such a small sample size. It's so we can communicate with them directly, possibly watch their first interactions with the game, and better understand what parts of the game is intuitive to them, and which aren't.
So I fully understand your concern with these vague questions, but I hope it makes a bit more sense why we still find them valuable, as they are kept consistent on a basis of multiple playtests and not just a single sample per tester.
For a frog customization u need to give him potions, the water change de color and then u have the frog with different color.
For example if u have a a health potion (red) the water will change to red then frog take that potion though the skin and the color change to shiny red
Haha, love that!
The game looks really prommising, i also wanna try it one day.
However, like you said in the video, the stirring is quite hard to get it right. I probably sont get motionsick, bit moving around with your head still will probably make it hard to actually look at something in game and sort of forces you to look nowhere until you are finished stirring. Note the useage of the word "probably", since i have not playtested it so i dont speak from experience.
I do believe (Like jackandy said in their comment) that some kind of camera lock would be beneficial. However, like you replied, it is not really something that fits in the game
So i would also not lock the camera. But you can totally just make the camera less sensitive. And to make sure this is not just some kind of thing you have to enter and exit, you can just make it so holding the spoon will smoothly make the camera movement slower.
I think this worth a try.
Again, its just a thought of mine, so take it with a grain of salt.
Anyhow, really really cool game
Really good idea! Could make for a good middle ground for the stirring for sure 🤔
You definitely learn the best lessons within play testing! I think the main issue with the brewing mini game is that it moves your camera around, and from the short clip in the video, it seems like it could be a bit repetitive. One idea, which is a bit technical, could be to give the player a top down view of the pot, allow them to brew without it shaking the camera, and then have the liquid have different areas of colors that you have to get to blend together.
I also like @Len923_'s comment about stoking the fire. Getting the pot up to a certain heat and making sure it's boiling would be cool. Having some balance between the heat & stirring of the pot would make a nice interaction.
Lastly, the opening and closing mechanic is pretty nice, but I do feel like it allows players to completely opt out of some "rush" hour esk behavior completely. Might be intentional, but I think adding some sort of balance there where if you open/close sporadically, you lose out on potential customers. I could go on and on, which means you're on to something here :)
Great points! Appreciate the feedback!
We have actually introduced a bellows minigame that we are currently playing around with. It is essentially about keeping the heat at the correct level, otherwise the potion won't brew. Different potions hold different patterns.
We're hesitant on locking the camera though, as we dont do it for any other interaction in the game, and generally the first person simulatuon genre doesnt do this. Of course we dont mind going against the norm, but doing so would need some consideration 🤔
@@BobsiDevlog Yeah that makes sense. You could probably do a "soft lock" on the camera so it's not super immersion breaking. Some limits on the rotation as the player moves the mouse around. Definitely requires a lot of experimentation!
@@Jaryt yeah, we are discussing all these options right now. That option struct me as well. I'm sure we'll figure out, and all this feedback is super helpful for this!
For a brewing minigame you could try to incorporate all elements of making a potion. Maybe kindle the fire to just the right temperature for each potion, then place the ingredients in the right order and timing, then pour it into a flask without spilling anything. Something like this that leaves room for error i think could make people more engaged with the process and feel more satisfied with what they made
Really good ideas! I love the pouring idea. That could make for an interesting interaction
looks genuinely good and you can see the homie feeling of an Indie dev trying to connect with the community and trying to polish their game
will wishlist!
Really appreciate it, and thank you for the kind words!
something for the brewing - maybe a minigame where you slide a slider to an "objective" that moves around - kind of like stardew valley fishing
also maybe make the frog tell the time or something similar
We actually are playing with that with bellows to control the heat right now. Different potions hold different patterns
Not sure if it is in the game as I have just stumbled upon this game. But an idea to incorporate into the brewing mini game is to give the potions a quality rating. (Similar to the stars in StarDew Valley, the higher stars would sell for more) this would give the player an incentive to try and get good at the mini games. This would also allow you as a developer to increase the difficulty of making different potions more reasonable.
So quality is indeed in the brewing, but not a part of the minigame. Essentially the brewing consists of the greek elements (fire, earth, wind, air) coming from the ingredients. The more total greek elements in the brew, the larger the potion, and the closer to the perfect ratio of the recipe, the higher the quality 🙂
To stick as closely to the idea of stirring the pot for the brewing mini-game, you could have the camera leave the player and hover fixed over the pot to reduce the motion sick feelings, and then to make the mini-game feel less repetitive, you could make it so that they have to stir different shapes into the brew, with each shape boosting the progress a bit faster, regardless of the speed in which it was drawn.
The random selection (barring repeating something twice in a row) of the shape to draw makes it less repetitive, increases interactivity/engagement, and the fixed camera position above the cauldron means that players can not only be more accurate in stirring in the shapes, but the chance for motion sickness is almost completely dropped (it might still be a problem in the transition from one to the other, but that's what more playtests would be for).
The game seems interesting, I hope you get it all figured out in a way which you enjoy most.
Really appreciate the feedback!
We've generally opted away from the camera locking, but looking at suggestions from this video, it is definitely something we'll be reconsidering. We found it immersion breaking as we aren't "taking" the camera from the player anywhere else in the game, but perhaps it just makes sense to do here. Definitely something to revisit for us.
I'm not very big on the idea of stealing the camera either, but it's the only way I could see a reduction in motion sickness while keeping with a system that requires the player to use their mouse as input.
Either way I hope you figure out something that works best for everyone.
@@AuxiarMolkhun Cheers! We're exploring all our ideas
Ohhh I'm def interested. Wishlisted and excited to see how this turns out.
Really appreciate it! means a lot :)
The frog should give you special mission path of making a secret potion to turn it into a princess
Haha! Easter egg mission perhaps
It is looking good!
Some feedback: The brewing interface looks a bit off. Integrating it into the environment (using manuscripts in your case) may be a good idea but I don't think it works in the current state. Things like progress bars do not integrate well into the environment and make the experience look "cheap".
I'd suggest trying to make he brewing experience as immersive as possible, it may be the most defining mechanic of the game.
Keep up the good work and good luck with the game!
Appreciate the feedback. We've tried revamping this UI multiple times, but find it really difficult to nail. Please do elaborate on your take here, would love to understand more!
I'm not normally one for pointless customization and hats; but I cannot articulate how strongly every part of my body said "give that frog hats!" when asked how it should be customized.
An array of them flashed before my minds eye: top hat with monocle; witches hat; maybe a cap like in the classic frog and toad books... All the while; the frog beneath the hat is completely unfased. Giving that vacant frog stare and ribbiting occassionally. Editorialize it even - put in narration about how much the frog loves his new hat while showing no visible reaction from the frog.
"You put the regal crown on Croakie. Oh! Look how much he loves it!"
Frog: ........ *ribbit*
Love this! Now we have to do it 💰
To be honest I would question if it is necessary to make brewing a core mechanic, but in my opinion there should be an explanation to why the stick is brewing. Some Ideas:
- you have a helper that helps you run the store and also brews the potion when all ingredients are placed into the pot
- make a magic motion to magically move the brewing stick
Well the core aspects of the game is:
- Brewing
- Shop keeping
- Plant keeping
And brewing is really the thing tying the two others into the game as well, so either way we'd have to nail that aspect.
We are actually considering adding some level of automation to the game, possibly in the form of helper goblins, etc. 🙂
Freeze player movement when stirring. That should help with the motion sickness.
We thought about it. Main issue being, we dont do that for any other interaction. So we're hesitant on introducing that 🤔 but maybe we should try it
Super insightful video, hope to see more videos covering your game in the future!
Appreciate it! There will be more for sure
would be cool if you could hire someone to talk with the customers or something like that
Automation is actually something we're talking about. Possibly little goblins that only do one job, like watering the plants, doing the brewing mini game, running the shop, etc.
I love the Minecraft music
Haha, glad you like the music!
idea for potion brewing minigame:
similar to the potions minigame in the harry potter half-blood prince by EA
when I played that minigame, I found it pretty fun
it gives you control over the difficulty of each potion
as well as depending on how well a player brews a potion, you could assign a quality to the end product
hope this helps
Sounds interesting! I am not familiar with it. How does that work?
@@BobsiDevlog it has quite a bit going on,
there are some videos of the minigame on youtube itself.
just search: harry potter half blood prince potions minigame
@@BobsiDevlog you can search on youtube itself for how it looks/works
just search: harry potter half blood prince potions minigame
there are some videos on it, both the in-game tutorial and some of the most difficult ones
@@BobsiDevlog you can search for harry potter half blood prince potion minigame on RUclips itself, there are some videos on both the in game tutorial and end game potions
@@BobsiDevlog I've tried replying thrice but i can't see my replies
Just stumbled upon your channel. Great video!
Thank you very much!
Consider things like temperature control on the fire as you add different ingredients. Maybe you need to mash a certain ingredient before it goes in, maybe another ingredient needs to be boiled for a while for the potency to come out. There could be optimizations that the player makes to the potion-brewing process where they naturally order certain steps to make sure they're doing it as fast as possible, although that might be repetitive and boring, I dunno.
Consider having this system, but having the ability to "record" a potion being brewed for an apprentice or a familiar or an imp or a magic automaton or something to make it. I dunno. This makes optimization still valuable because if you can optimize the process of a potion to have more things happening in parallel so the entire process of a single potion finishes sooner, but that finishing sooner means that the helper can move on to another potion sooner.
I know I mentioned different ingredients requiring being processed in different ways, but also think about adding, say, a bundle of chopped leaves in a bag for a set period of time, then removing it, because the base of the potion is a sort of tea.
Consider that multiple potions may extend off a common base, much like how in chemistry there are some chemicals that are "precursor" chemicals to others in reactions, and thus it might be advantageous to have, say, five batches of blarglargle tea steeping in the background for when you'll almost certainly need it later, because there's an outbreak of magical diseases and the different creatures require slightly different potions made.
I dunno.
all I want out of game dev is an xcom game that has new xcom tactical battles and old xcom base and logistics and geoscape management
Also consider as a manual pacing adjuster that players have agency over, have the ability to put out ads with the town crier or something that will increase pressure on you as it will attract more business to the shop. Maybe have a base progression rate that is very slow, but that the player will naturally want to speed up to keep interesting by putting up fliers or having the town crier announce the player's services or whatever.
Ah, I see some of the ideas I had for treating different ingredients differently were discussed like two minutes later in the video lol.
Yeah, we have some ingredient manipulation, but your ideas here are super great! Definitely bringing this up in the next meeting. Really appreciate the time taken here!
8:21 the frog n e e d s a hat
The frog shall be given a hat then. What kind of hat?
@@BobsiDevlog a tophat perhaps
@@BobsiDevlog conical wizard hat
@@BobsiDevlog wizard hat that u can customize, maybe make the frog a special ingredient in potions so that it only respawns like every 10 mins and itll mke the potion like super good
maybe make the frog a special ingredient in potions so that it only respawns like every 10 mins and itll mke the potion like super good
Love that idea! A little extra for the frog
very cool game and im v keen to see how it develops! i think for the minigame, no matter the solution, it would be more fun if the amount of success you have in the minigame affects the outcome of the potion. instead of it just being a _thing you have to do_ in order to brew the potion, it be better if _how well you do thing_ influences the outcome. and give it a scale, instead of being a binary outcome, so people can feel like they are improving at it!
Definitely not the first with that suggestion. It is something we'll definitely be re-visiting to figure out how we can ensure it feeling rewarding for the player.
The easiest and simplest feedback for a brewing minigame is to tie it to button presses rather than wiggling the mouse. Doing a circle with UP RIGHT DOWN LEFT as an input is quick and easy, but still something tactile the player can do to start brewing.
ignore the fighting game implications.
Interesting ideas for sure! We are currently amidst discussing the whole cauldron setup, so this will definitely be brought up as well. Thanks!
did you work on the last flame i noticed some characters from that game
No, i havent worked on that 🤔
my man to fix the otion sickness on the brewing all you need to do is the same as other games, lock the camera and make the mouse move the prop only.
Yeah, as we already discussed in other comment sections, it is something we're playing around with, however, generally first person sim games don't lock the camera because everything is meant to be kept in first person world space. It's a major factor of the genre, and locking the camera would go against that.
We're definitely not saying that we couldn't do it, but it isn't as much of a no-brainer decision as it may seem at first. Game design is hard :P
great video
Thank you! appreciate it
I feel like your character art clashes with the environment art. Also never test with 3F (friends, family, fools). For stirring or other minigames look at Dredge potentially
Definitely will give dredge a look. What aspect from the game?
And I don't really agree with the 3F. I think you can get a lot out of testing, especially with fools ;)
And a lot of our friends and general network are game developers, and their feedback has been incredibly harsh and extremely valuable to us. Our methods of testing so far at least has shaped the game from the beginning, having run 5-6 playtests at this point.
@@BobsiDevlog Dredge has some varied minigames for fishing that you could take inspiration from if that style of minigame suits your game
It would be cool if many of the patrons were human too
That was the original idea, but the game just felt like it was missing a lot of personality and unique traits, which is why we went with this crooked universe. We're currently working on an intro cinematic that should shine a little comedic light as to why we are in this situation :-)