I try to get someone to play something we’ve been doing, at-at minimum, once a week. Uh, we’ve done things where, especially good when you’re developing on mobile - we get in at the bus stop and just get people to play it for five, ten minutes and see what that initial experience is like. Complete strangers, people we’ve never met before. So because we do that, we’ll do 35 play tests in an afternoon, and just get this huge breadth of experiences and feedback, which is incredible In the same time, I have particular people in my life who’s - and they’re not gamers, and they’re not developers, they’re just people who I know are going to talk totally straight to me, and whose opinion I really, really respect, and I just know that whatever they tell me, it’s going to be pure solid gold. I always try to get a lot of breadth with our, our play testing, you know, even if we’re not making a game necessarily for kids, I love getting two and three year-olds to play the game, and even they don’t really know what they’re doing, they’re just kind of blindly poking around the screen. There’s something to that, because we can see where their eye is being drawn, what’s grabbing their attention. There’s so much that we can learn from play testing, and lot of the time, it isn’t really even about listening about what those people say necessarily - it’s about watching how they react, and what they do. Um, I had a play tester - this is a long time ago when I was working on a puzzle game, and there was a kid, and I said to the kid, how are you feeling about this game? And he said, you know what I really want right now is a tank - I really want a tank to just roll over these things and kill everyone. And I was immediately like, well, obviously, we’re not going to add a tank, that’s just stupid. But it sort of dawned on me later that, really was interesting about that is this kid at that point was looking for two things - variety and empowerment. And that was kind of a powerful realization to have that, you know, they were saying something, but there was, reading between the lines, it was really valuable insight there, even though, you know, at first glance it would be easy to dismiss that as just, you know, an offhanded silly comment.
