Eric bij Ronimo Games

Maandag had ik een kort blogpostje geschreven voor de Ronimo website. Ik post hem hier ook even:

"Testing your game is one of the most important and time consuming parts of game development. As a game design intern at Ronimo Games I spend about half of my time each day playing and tweaking our next game. The other half I spend on taking out the trash, crying in a bathroom stall and building furniture. Every second of a game must be designed, tested and tweaked until it feels and plays perfectly. When something doesn’t play right we change a few variables, test it again to see if the changes were the right ones and move on. Because of all this testing we’ve become quite adept at the game. But this is often more of a burden than a blessing. For example, in order to figure out if the difficulty of the game is up to snuff you need players who don’t know the game that well. Sure, we could use artist to test the game. But I’m afraid their mutated Wacom fingers will try to fingerpaint lens flares on my glasses. And that’s why we held a playtest session with real people last Saturday.

About a dozen people showed up at our office near the canals of Utrecht to test the new game for a few hours. Some of them had played the game previously, others got their cherries popped. Here at Ronimo Games we like to treat our playtesters like popstars. As such each playtester got his own bowl filled with the most delicious types of candy we could find on short notice. Pepernoten, Mars & other chocolate covered sweets named after Greek gods. During the test Fabian & I took notes on everything the players stumbled upon. We also asked testers to explain certain aspects of the game to see if they understood it. Together with a five page long questionnaire this generated quite a lot of information. Information we will now use to better our game.

Soon we’ll be doing more playtests. If you’re interested in testing send us an e-mail at Testers@Ronimo-Games.com"