Chapter 9: Functionality, Completeness, and Balance

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Overview

Now that you've tried your hand at the playtesting process, you are probably wondering what to do with all the comments your testers are giving you. How can you prioritize all these ideas and comments into a helpful list of changes to your game? Unless you are superhuman and can process hundreds of details at once, you need a way to focus your thinking. You need a way to take your game step by step from a crude mock-up of the core gameplay to a fully functioning model of your entire system. This chapter provides some tangible steps you can take to make sure your game is functional, complete, and balanced.

The process we suggest here is based on years of watching student and professional game designers work through this very problem. What we've found in this experience is that it's important to break the playtesting process down into several discreet phases-each phase focusing on specific aspects of the design, perfecting these aspects, and only then moving on to the next phase.

Of course, as we've discussed, games are dynamic, interrelated systems. A change to one part of the system can completely change the player's perception of another. We realize this, and the process we're about to walk through is a vast simplification of what you will actually experience when you try this yourself. What's important to take away from this process is the need to focus your mind on the distinct goals of each phase, not try to fix everything in your game all at once. We want you to feel in control of this process, and giving you these goal-based phases and a method to move your game through them is a good way to do that.

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