Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Player Feedback - Hear the problem

Without question, player feedback is an imperative step in game development. However, player feedback must be filtered.

When players give you feedback they will most often give you solutions. You must look past these suggestions (though they can be sound) and find the underlying problem that is frustrating players.

Once you have identified the underlying problem you can plan out multiple solutions. Now you can evaluate each solution. Does it fit your game design? How expensive is it to implement? Can my team do this? Cull the less effective solutions and highlight the best solution.

An Example: SKATE 2
A favorite game of my mine, SKATE, was bemoaned because you would not "get off the skateboard and walk around." This complaint (suggestion) was repeated endlessly. So in SKATE 2 this feature was implemented. Developer interviews described this feature was very expensive time/animation wise. In the end getting off your skateboard in SKATE 2 was frustratingly clunky.

Perhaps highlighted the problem (players want to get to any point without being limited by skateboard movement) would reveal other solutions that would have been cheaper to implement and had a better outcome.

I would rather have a "magic cursor" that could move the skater to any point, move around objects, etc. One could argue this breaks the immersion of the game but the game already has reset points and the resulting controls of getting off the skateboard, walking and moving objects was insanely frustrating.

So the next time a player gives you a suggestion to make your game better, thank them, document, then look past the suggestion to the problem hiding behind the player's words.