teaching machines

CS 491 Lecture 10 – Puzzler Review

October 2, 2015 by Chris Johnson. Filed under fall 2015, gamedev2, lectures.

Agenda

• what ?s
• puzzler review

TODO

• For next Wednesday, read a couple of articles on game loops. Unity manages the game loop on our behalf, but understanding its operation is helpful and there might come a day where you’ll want to write your own. Read Koen Witters’ deWITTERS Game Loop (broken link at last check; find the archived version at the Wayback Machine) and Glenn Fiedler’s Fix Your Timestep.

Review

Today we’re going to playtest your puzzlers!

Jeremy Gibson advocates these points when doing informal playtesting:

1. Don’t tell the player too much. You want to discover what’s obvious and what’s obscure.
2. Don’t argue or make excuses. If your testers think something is wrong, you want them to freely voice it. If you react in a defensive way, even if you are right, you will raise their hackles and cut yourself off from their input.
3. Take notes. Someone else’s ideas are by definition not yours, and having a written record will help you from misinterpreting. Also, one individual’s comments are not significant enough to consider in isolation. By collecting notes across many playtesters, you will get a better feel for what changes will have the most significant impact.

Haiku