Building a video game is hard. The development cycle is filled with testing and review of new and existing features, but doing it entirely in-house, especially with a small team like ours, often leads to teams overlooking obvious areas of improvement or not being able to come up with new, creative innovations to be added and implemented.?
Now that our team has created a solid playable build of The Rabbit Haul, we have switched to an open-development cycle, where we playtest with a handful of dedicated gamers each month, and use their feedback to help navigate us to the next level. Changing to this style of development has drastically improved our sprints, allowing us to focus on what matters the most to our gamers.
Want to do it yourself? Below we dive into what we’ve learned through our first two playtest cycles.?
- People love playtesting! Our community has come out in droves to support us in the playtesting phase of our game. We saw nearly 400 individual runs of The Rabbit Haul in our initial test, with our most dedicated gamer playing nearly 19 hours of the game! When I spoke with him, he mentioned that he loved supporting a studio that was so open with their game’s progress, as he originally found out about the game at Gamescom 2023. We also saw a sizable portion of our playtesters attend both the February and March playtest sessions, excited about the idea to see their feedback implemented in real time.?
- Strategy is what you make it. As developers, we tend to play the game in a specific way to get the victory. With dozens of players, they each play the game in their own unique way. Because we’ve blended the cozy genre of farming simulation with the strategy genre of tower defense, we have testers from all walks of gaming. This playtesting loop allows us to see how random people try to win - whether that be through growing their farms to the max, or optimizing their towers and weaponry to best defend against the Trash Panda Posse, or anything else they can come up with. They’ve broken our game in more ways than we imagined possible!
- All feedback is valuable feedback. It sucks to get a negative review of the game. However, by running public playtesting during our development, we’re able to make changes that we wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. Some ideas that we’ve implemented haven’t hit the mark with our gaming community, so we have made changes that have resulted in more positive feedback between our February and March playtests, and we anticipate to see more going forward. Our community has also given us great recommendations of future features, some of which we have already included.?
We are looking forward to creating a full demo of The Rabbit Haul within the upcoming months, and we wouldn’t be able to do it without our playtesting community. We are going to be continuing our regular playtests throughout Q2 and Q3 of 2024, with regular updates provided to our community on the progress of the game. We hope to continue to grow our playtesting group, as getting feedback from our players is instrumental in our success.
If you are interested in our open-development cycle, I highly encourage you to join our Discord, where we share news updates and conduct our playtests: https://discord.gg/UVDt2ScaDJ
