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游戏测试过程之确定测试地点和测试对象

发布时间:2011-07-21 10:15:42 Tags:,,

作者:Paul Sztajer

继之前谈完测试目的后,现在我们就来谈谈具体测试内容。

本文主要谈论测试地点和测试族群。

首先你要决定是在线测试还是离线测试。这两个模式都有其利弊。

在线测试能带给你更大曝光度,能够覆盖更多玩家,且不会耗费额外时间。但你需要完成更多游戏设置任务,从中获得数据,处理所有这些数据是个痛苦过程。离线测试让你获悉特定玩家反馈,能够轻松瞄准特定问题。这需要让参与者聚集至同一房间(游戏邦注:至少除你之外还有其他人),根据安排时间限制玩家数量。

将二者结合起来是个理想模式,特别是在开发后期,此时你既希望吸引众多玩家的眼球,又希望维持离线测试的高检验标准。但在早期测试,离线测试便可。

接着就是确定测试群体。

和纯粹数据一样,你需确定测试族群。这和之前确定的测试目的密切相关。

particulars from throwthelookingglass.com

particulars from throwthelookingglass.com

有些因素可以说非常重要:年龄、性别、游戏技能、是否玩过类似游戏以及之前是否接触过你的作品。“有些”是因为游戏还有其他标准(若你报名参加《Particulars》测试,我会问你物理问题),“可以说”是因为若游戏有要求,你应当只关注这些因素(你会发现报名表上并没有要求性别。我们希望你在括号内注明年龄,方便我们测评不同市场的玩家兴趣)。

覆盖不同内容对所有测试来说都是最重要的,所以下面就来谈谈游戏技能,这既是例证,也是你多数时候需要考虑的元素。若测试主要目的是决定核心机制是否有趣,那么你会希望瞄准熟练玩家,因为他们能够快速掌握控制装置和游戏机制,然后告诉你游戏是否有趣。资深玩家同时还善于发现游戏中的不平衡元素。相反,若你希望获悉游戏教授情况,最好瞄准那些从未玩过游戏的群体。他们若能顺利融入你的游戏,那么所有人都能够做到(游戏邦注:这就是为什么测试新UI最好瞄准年长者)。最后你会希望测试所有群体,即便每个测试只瞄准单个类型(例如,你会希望知道优质教授系统是否令资深玩家感到厌烦)。

获悉测试目的后,测试群体和测试地点也就变得一目了然。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Playtesting 102: Who and where

by Paul Sztajer

This is part 2 in a series on how to playtest games (part 1).

Now you know why you’re playtesting, it’s time to use that knowledge to figure out some of the details of the tests you’ll be performing.

In this post, I’ll be looking at two aspects of this: where you should playtest, and who should be testing your game.

The first thing you should probably decide is whether you’re testing online or offline. These two options each have their attractors and detractors.

Online testing gives you larger exposure and allows you to test more people with no added time taken in testing itself. However, you need to do a lot more in-game setup to get data, and working through all the data can be a pain. Offline testing allows you to see specific player reactions to your game and can make pinpointing specific problems very easy. Yet it requires you to get participants into the same room as you (and probably at least one other person), and really limits how many players you can use, based on how much time you have.

Ideally you will be using a combination of both of these, particularly later in development, where you want a lot of eyeballs looking at your game, but also want to maintain that high level of scrutiny that offline testing provides. For early testing, however, you can easily just do offline tests (see my post on how many playtesters you need to get a better idea of why this is).

In fact, you should read that post now anyway, as the next step is to work out who should be playtesting your game.

As well as sheer numbers, however, you need to decide on a demographic to test with. This specifically relates to the testing purpose you previously decided upon.

Some things that can be important are: age, sex, general gaming expertise, whether they’ve played similar games and whether they’ve seen your game before. ‘Some’ because there are probably other requirements specific to your game (you’ll notice that if you sign up to playtest Particulars that I’ll ask you about your physics education), and ‘can’ because you should only care about these things if your game requires you to (you’ll note that we don’t ask for gender in our sign-up form, and we want to know about age in terms of brackets, and this is actually for us to gauge player interest in different markets).

For each test, different aspects will be most important, so I’ll be talking about gaming expertise both as an illustrative example and as something that you’ll have to consider 90% of the time. If the main purpose of the test is to determine if the core gameplay is fun, you might want expert gamers to have a look at the game as they’ll quickly pick up the controls and mechanics and get right into telling you if the gameplay is fun. Expert gamers are also great at finding imbalances in your game. Conversely, if you’re interested in how well the game teaches, your best bet is to go for people who’ve never played a game in their life. If they can pick up your game without any problems, anyone can (this is why it’s great to test new UI’s with the elderly). Eventually, you’ll really want to test with all types of people, even if each test only looks at a single type (for instance, you need to know if your awesome teaching system that can teach anyone is really boring to the expert gamer).

If you look at the purpose for your test, who and where you need to test should become fairly clear. If not, if you have any questions or have a story about the where or who of playtesting, please let us know in the comments.

That’s it for now. Next time, we’ll be looking at what you’re measuring.(Source:gamasutra


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