作者：Tuomo Eskola

我们的下一款游戏《Hannu the Hunter》将在一个月内发行，而我们为这款游戏所投入的最后一项努力便是利用开发团队外部的beta测试者去平衡游戏。我们认为这一最终测试阶段是开发过程中最重要的阶段。这也是我们想要与你们分享我们在《Hannu the Hunter》beta测试中所获得的宝贵经验的原因。

难度是很难平衡的

当beta测试阶段即将开始时，我们先假设这是一款非常简单的游戏。当我们在观看一些玩家经历第一节游戏时，我们便知道自己的假设是错误的。实际上游戏非常困难。我们所犯的错误便是高估了玩家在基于行动/精确度的挑战中的学习速度。让我对此作出进一步分析：

time played(from gamasutra)

我们可以假设玩家的行动技能将在开始的时候快速发展，在经过足够的练习后存在一个大多数玩家都能够达到的最大技能级别。很简单吧？所以我们需要做的便是不断地提高游戏难度，然后再提供给玩家多样但却基于同样难度水平的挑战。

而这里存在的问题是行动技能需要玩家花费时间去学习。当玩家在睡觉时行动技能也会继续发展，他们甚至需要花费几天，几周甚至是几个月的时间才能真正精通需要大量精确度的游戏。而我们的游戏过快提升着行动难度，所以玩家将很容易因此受挫。我们的开发团队（已经致力于这款游戏好几个月时间）在决定难度级别时显然不是一支优秀的测试团队。他们正是太有经验了，所以很难站在玩家的角度去考虑他们的学习体验。

通常情况下找到合适的难度提升速度的方法便是使用beta测试者。特别是在评估玩家学习行动技能的速度时，凭空猜测是没有用的。

直觉性

优秀的游戏设计师总是能将自己置于玩家的角色中并准确猜出玩家觉得怎样的内容具有直觉性。

在《Hannu the Hunter》的开发过程中我们需要经历许多这样的直觉性猜测，我也敢说大多数猜测都是准确的。但问题就在于我们的一些基于直觉性的游戏暗示对于玩家的体验非常重要，所以我们不能只是假设我们的猜测是正确的。

这时候beta测试者便能够提供很大的帮助。当你拥有一些玩家能够按照你所预想的方式在游戏中行动时，你便能够肯定自己的游戏带有直觉性。当然了你也会注意到那些让玩家迷失方向的部分，而全新的beta测试者将能够向你呈现出这些错误。

与设备相关的游戏漏洞

Halkologic Games是一家小型游戏工作室，我们不可能使用许多不同的设备去测试我们的手机游戏。而beta测试者（游戏邦注：因为他们能够使用自己的设备对游戏进行测试）能够提供给我们基于不同设备的更广泛的游戏性能样本。通常情况下beta测试阶段总是能够揭露我们的游戏中至少一个严重的漏洞。

我们不得不承认的是，我们在alpha测试阶段忘了测试当帧率下降时我们的游戏会怎样。所以在beta测试阶段某些设备将不能基于典型的60帧/秒运行，所以在这些设备上游戏实体内容将会变得一团糟。这也证实了我们在一个错误的更新循环中编写了一些实体更新程序。这会导致实体内容在某些设备上会坍塌，但在我们的设备上却能够有效运行。幸运的是这并不是一个很难解决的问题。

结论

我们的结论便是，beta测试真的非常重要。这是游戏发行前的最后一道关卡—-这时候的游戏将脱离开发者的怀抱并且我们能够判断游戏表现到底怎样。除此之外开发者也能在这一阶段观察玩家与他们所创造的内容间的真正互动。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Why beta testers are so valuable – examples from real life

by Tuomo Eskola

Our next game Hannu the Hunter will be released within a month and one of the last effort has been balancing the game using beta testers outside of our own dev team. We feel that this final testing phase has turned out to be possibly the most important phase of the development. That’s why we wanted to share with you these examples of vital information that we have acquired in Hannu the Hunter beta testing.

Difficulty is hard to balance

When the beta test phase was about to start our honest hypothesis was that the game is likely too easy. After we had seen couple of players tackle through the first quarter of the game, it was clear that our assumptions were very wrong. It was in fact too difficult. Our mistake was to overestimate the players’ speed of learning in motorics/accuracy type challenges. Here’s a figure of what I mean:

It’s fair to assume that the player’s motoric skills develop fast in the beginning and there is some rather constant maximum skill level that most player’s will achieve at some point after enough practice. Simple right? So all we need to do is increase the game difficulty gradually and after that offer the player varying but equally difficult challenges.

The problem is that Motoric skills tend to take time to learn. They develop when you sleep and it takes days, weeks or even months to master games that require alot of accuracy. Our game was increasing the motoric difficulty level too fast and the players got furstrated. Our developer team – that has been working with a game for months – was a poor test group when it came to determining a proper level of difficulty. They were just too experienced and could no longer imagine the fresh player’s learning experience.

Often the only way to find the right speed of difficulty increase is to use beta testers. Especially when it comes to estimating player’s speed of learning motoric skills, pure guessing is unlikely to work.

Intuitiveness

Good game designers can put them selves into player’s role and make quite accurate guesses of what will feel intuitive for the player and what will not.

Naturally we had to make tons of such intuitiveness guesses during Hannu the Hunter development and I dare to claim that most of them were pretty correct. The thing is that some of our game’s intuitiveness based hints are extremely vital to the player’s experience, and we couldn’t just assume that our guesses were correct.

That’s where the beta testers were of great help. When you have seen handful of player’s acting in game as you intended, you can be far more sure that your game is in fact intuitive. Then of course there are those few places where you notice that the player’s get lost, and it is the fresh beta testers that are the only people who can show you those errors.

Device related game bugs

Halkologic Games is a smallish game studio and we have limited capability to test our mobile games with different devices. The beta testers (that usually use their own devices for testing) offer us a wider sampling of the game’s performance on different devices. As usual, once again the beta phase revealed atleast one serious bug in our game.

It’s a little embarrassing to admit but in our alpha testing phase we forgot to test what happens to our game if the frame rate drops. So in beta testing phase some devices were not running with the typical ~60 frames per second rate and what happened was that on those devices the game physics got really messed up. It turned out that we had programmed some of our physics updates in wrong update loop (we are using Unity). That caused physics to fail on some devices, but to work correctly when played with our own devices, that were running the game with maximum frame rate. Luckly the issue was easy to fix after it was realized.

Summary

Our conclusion is that beta testing is extremely important. It’s the last mile stone before release – the phase when it’s time to come out of the developer’s bubble and see if the game is actually good. Besides, it can be very inspiring to finally see people interacting with your creation. （source：Gamasutra）