How can prototyping enhance your understanding of player behavior?

Player behavior matters because it reflects how players interact with your game, what they find fun and engaging, and what motivates them to keep playing. By analyzing player behavior, you can optimize your game for your target audience, increase retention and monetization, and create a better user experience

Game Design is a dialogue between designers and players, using a weird language we call a game. As hosts in this game world we create, it's our duty to observe our guests and understand them even when they don't know a single word in that language. So think of player behavior as the mimicking and gesturing that allows foreigners to understand and be understood regardless of language proficiency.

Player behavior is the key indicator to determine your games engagement level. Measuring it at the earliest stage possible helps you building a strong core , and drag content into what player expects.

What you think is fun or intuitive isn’t always the case in real life. This is why understanding how your players think is crucial and through prototyping, you can learn it quite easily. Have some player play your game prototype and observe them. Perhaps even ask them questions about what they just did or what they think should happen next. These would allow you to really understand your players.

Testing core and control mechanics in prototypes yields quick results, simplifying analysis of player behavior. Challenges arise in games where level design or narrative guides behavior, leading to complex outcomes that can demotivate the development team. Prioritize warning and preparing the team for potentially worse-than-expected results. Alternatively, ensure a vertical slice in story, systems, and level design before testing player behavior. Visual and audio enhancements can be skipped. In visually and audio-focused games, the prototype must address different priorities. Every game has its own development style, and even what the prototypes in this process should include can vary greatly.

Constatly A/B testing content & core mechanics at early prorotype stage allows you to make data driven results, adding / removing features might feel right but at the end of the day, data is the most important thing on this stage. Observing churns , and other events helps you determine how good is your funnel in game and lets you make changes accoordingly.

Creating mock-ups or prototypes allows your studio to test certain concepts or mechanics without fully investing in a design that might not work with your audience, which saves you money and time. You can quickly iterate on feedback and test again without sacrificing a lot of your resources.

The best thing I can compare user testing to is an experiment within a lab.?? The difference is you aren't just testing a single hypothesis and players won't experience a game the same way outside of this virtual lab As designer you will also come in your own hopes and desires, be mindful to keep whatever elements you are testing as close to the final experience as you can. ??

Here, Dynamics are key. Dynamic emerge from Mechanics as famously proposed in the MDA Framework. They represent the behaviors player show when interacting with a game, and are a better way of describing purposes and intentions than isolated interactions with Mechanics. If you don't understand Dynamics, there's a significant risk your Mechanics will feel like they're there for their own sake in a prototype stage. So when defining the scope of a prototype, try to model a dynamic within your game so you can formulate better hypotheses ahead of playtests and also measure how accurately you are really understanding your audience as a designer.

Few key indicators for measuring player behaviour; - Churn rates - Win & fail ratio - Level complete rates ( if there are levels ) - Pick up / level up counts - In game progression events

In prototyping stage, a game's design needs to be super malleable. If you have a clear definition of Aesthetics and Dynamics you want to achieve with a game, adjusting its Mechanics and Systems will be a much less chaotic process since your team will have a rationale to follow - as opposed to just checking if ideas look subjectively "good". Tracing your decisions back to a game's vision and goals might not keep you from making mistakes, but it'll definitely help you learn from them more effectively.

Prototyping for any goal is iterative by nature. No prototype is perfect, and often completely turning a prototype on it's head with new ideas will highlight what worked and didn't work about previous attempts as well.