Don't make this assumption about your players (Developing 10)

Hi, my name is Mark, and I am making a video game about magnets. Okay, so this was the plan: take all of the levels I made in the previous episode, bundle them into a demo, slap that demo onto a Steam Deck, fly to San Francisco, and give the demo to people attending the Game Developers Conference. But with just one week to go before my flight, I gave my demo to a key playtester, and he did not enjoy it. He found it to be frustrating and tedious and gave up before the demo was even over.

And it was in that moment that I realised I had made a huge and pretty common mistake when it came to thinking about my game's level of difficulty. What did I do wrong, and critically, was I able to fix it before flying out to California? Well, stick around to find out.

Okay, let me back up a little bit. In the previous episode, I showed you how I used a puzzle matrix to help generate ideas for about 26 different levels. Then, after that episode went live, I bundled them into a pretty chunky hour-long demo, featuring three different worlds, two different magnets, and a bunch of different mechanics, like colour-changing panels, laser beams, moving platforms, boxes on wheels, spinning switches, and so on.

As always, the first people to get this demo were GMTK patrons on my Discord. They gave me loads of feedback and advice and unearthed bugs, exploits, annoyances, and inconsistencies. As always, I am hugely grateful for their help. Then, completely out of the blue, I get an email from one Patrick Traynor, the Patrick of Patrick's Parabox, the brilliant puzzle game I showed in the previous episode of this series. He thanked me for including his game in my video and wished me luck with my magnet game.

And I said, "Want to play a demo?" He very kindly said yes, and then a few days later, I get an email with a single word: "played," and a link to a YouTube video: a two-hour playthrough of the game. Now, if you're wondering why I'm hesitating, he gave me no indication of whether or not he liked the game, and so I would just have to watch him evaluate it in real-time. And so, if he hated the game, I would just have to sit there and watch someone become more and more disappointed in me, which is, you know, surely what parents are for, right?

But I finally worked up the courage to hit play on the video, and on the whole, he actually really liked it. He was laughing and smiling. He complimented me on some of the puzzles and talked up the potential behind the game's core mechanics. PATRICK: "These mechanics make me think like, 'Why isn't someone else made a magnet platformer like this before?'" And any criticisms he had came with brilliant help and advice. For example, I should make it more clear what the player can't do in any individual puzzle.

So, if a gap is too big for the player to jump, it should be a really big gap. If a door closes too quickly for the player to get through, it should snap shut immediately, stuff like that. He also gave me another huge piece of advice, which was to simplify the levels, even if that meant making the game easier. Advice which I roundly ignored, more on that in a bit. But anyway, there were about two weeks to go before GDC, so I decided to use all of the feedback from my patrons and from Patrick to overhaul the demo.

I removed a bunch of levels that just didn't quite work. This one relied way too much on quick reflexes to be a good puzzle. This one had a huge exploit which I couldn't easily fix. I also snuck in one level which was not a puzzle but was just pure platforming to see how players would react to that change of pace, but feedback was mixed, so I've left that on the cutting room floor for now. I also made some new puzzles to fill in those gaps.

I worked on improving the readability of certain mechanics in the game. For example, these icons which denote when a button is linked to an object. I also replaced this weird magnet sensor thing with a panel on a pulley which triggers a button when the rope hits the bottom point. I also swapped out these simple green buttons for a more satisfying Frankenstein-style switch. I made a lock and key for certain types of puzzles which has a pretty satisfying animation when you grab the key.

I polished up the pause menu and added in a better title screen. And, oh yeah, I made an entire new dialogue system. There's only one prototype conversation in this demo, but it should hopefully give people an idea of what the story might look like in the finished game. So, the demo was done and dusted. There was just one week to go before San Francisco, and so I gave the game to a key playtester. And as I said in the intro, he was not a fan.

He was frustrated and annoyed. He found levels overly complicated and just tedious to play. And in a lot of cases, he would simply hand me the controller and say, "Can you just, like, can you just do this one?" And that playtester, that was my dad. What'd I say about parents and disappointment? But, as painful as that playtest was, I think it was also the most important playtest in this entire development process. You see, at that moment, it was like seeing through the Matrix.

I could see exactly why and how I had messed up so badly. And I also realized that if I ever met Patrick in person, I would need to buy him a drink for ignoring his brilliant advice. So, here's what happened. Every time I would design a level, I would end up with a pretty simple layout for the puzzle which just tests the player on a single, nice little interaction. But then, I would assume that players would solve that puzzle immediately.

They would instantly smash through the puzzle and decide my game was too easy and thus boring, and thus judge me as a human being to be inherently worthless. So, I would be a little bit cheeky and add in some extra complexity to the level. I would add in a whole bunch of steps the player needs to go through in order to actually solve the puzzle. And I would add in these devious traps where if the player did one thing wrong, they'd be stuck and have to reset the puzzle back to zero.

And I would obscure the actual solution to the puzzle with some red herrings or some other elements. And in doing this devious, Machiavellian trickery, I would end up with puzzles that were messy and convoluted and frustrating and tedious to actually play. I was focused so much on making the levels hard, I had forgotten to make them fun. Oops. And here's the thing. I never actually checked that assumption. That assumption that players would immediately and instantly figure out the solution, was that actually true?

So, I took Patrick's advice and remade a whole bunch of levels in the demo with a core focus on clarity, elegance, and simplicity. Take this level, for example. In the original version, you have to use two magnets to flip two switches simultaneously, to lift two drill bits, to make a laser hit an orb to open a door. It is tedious just describing it. The actual puzzle in this level is, I think, pretty good but it's obscured behind so much extra fluff.

So, I remade it to look like this. It now requires just one magnet, has about three or four mechanics, it's really small, and it's really simple. Will players immediately figure out the trick to this puzzle? Well, I had literally no time to check. I had to compile the build, chuck it on the Steam Deck, drive to the airport, board the plane, and then sit in the same chair for 10 hours straight like a triple-A Dev in crunch mode.

Is that joke gonna get me in trouble? Is there going to be an angry Twitter thread about that? Okay, so I land in San Francisco, and after a few days of sightseeing - you know, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, the sea lions on Pier 39, In-N-Out Burger... oh god, no. The chips! What are you doing? But then it's GDC week, and I give the game to as many people as possible: at mixers, at meetups, at a bring-your-own-game event, at meetings, and during breakfast over big stacks of American-style pancakes (I guess they're not American-style, but they're just American pancakes. I'm in America).

And feedback on the demo was really pretty good. People kept saying, "This feels like a real video game," and people would refuse to give me the Steam Deck back until they had finished the entire demo. And to answer that question of, was the game now too easy? No, the game was actually kind of the right level of challenge. That puzzle I just talked about, for example, players would get stuck for like a minute or two and then figure out the solution and have that sort of wide-eyed aha moment I've always been chasing.

I didn't have any of that confusion and frustration. They just found it to be a good, fun, satisfying puzzle. What turns out, it was completely the right—Jesus Christ, that's a big spider. Uh—where was I? Turns out it was completely the right move to make the game easier, and in fact, I hadn't gone far enough. There was one level in the demo that was still pretty fiddly. One enthusiastic American described it as, "Gee, this one's a real stumper."

And there were also just a bunch of basic, fundamental mechanics in the game that I had never properly taught to players, and that was making them stumble. Like being able to use the magnet to ride up to a higher platform or change the magnet's polarity from afar. These were things that I felt were so obvious about my game that I didn't feel the need to have them as puzzle solutions or tutorials. But to someone who has never played my game before, they have no idea.

And so this is the big takeaway from this video: American cuisine is pretty bad, but they do know how to make a good breakfast. Wait, no, sorry, that's the wrong video. This is the big takeaway from this video: always challenge your assumptions about your players. I assumed that players would find my game to be too easy, and so ended up making the levels to be frustrating, complicated, and convoluted. And I assumed that people would know how to play my game, and so forgot to tutorialise about half of the mechanics.

Now I don't feel too bad because I know that this is actually a really common mistake in game design. It's so easy to assume that players will have the same skill, knowledge, and understanding as you, the uh designer who's been playing the game every day for months on end, knows literally all of the solutions to all of the puzzles and literally wrote the rules of the game. Mark, you fool! And so it's no surprise that developers can end up tuning the game to be too difficult or to not properly communicate some of the game's mechanics.

And as a game designer, it's one of your key jobs to fight this urge and to really try and put yourself in the shoes of the player. So, I want to close out this video with some tips and techniques that I have learned for doing a much more effective job at this. For one, Mario's maker Shigeru Miyamoto tells his new designers to try playing the games with their left and right hands switched on the controller, which should hopefully give you an experience of being an inexperienced player.

That's quite a bold one, but perhaps you can think of ways to simulate the experience of being someone who doesn't have all of your skills and knowledge about the game. Also, Patrick, we actually did meet up at GDC, and I bought him that drink. Patrick assured me that thinking like a player is a skill that you can hone and develop over time. And as I've shown in this video, I think the best way to achieve this is to watch other people play your game.

If possible, you want to be in the same room as them. There's nothing more humbling than sitting next to someone who absolutely doesn't understand what the heck your game is even about. You also want to play with people of all sorts of experience levels and skill levels. Some of my absolute best playtests come from my two nephews, aged seven and ten, though I do have to watch out for bias. MARK: "Jack, what are your thoughts on the game?" JACK:"One million out of-- I love it!"

MARK: "Thank you. Rory, what do you think of Untitled Magnet Game?" RORY:"I love it". MARK: "Thank you". That is, of course, a good reminder to spend more time watching how your playtesters play than listening to what they say. Oh, that's like I should put on like a t-shirt or something. Another tip is to think about your target audience for your game. Have an idea of the sort of person, the sort of skill level, experience level, and games they like to play.

Have that in mind and make sure you're designing the game for them. And make sure you're picking appropriate playtesters. A big part of this problem was that I was getting really worried that puzzle game experts, people who played and completed Stephen's Sausage Roll and Baba is You, that those people would play my game and think it was simple and dumb and bad. But they're not in my target audience. I want this game to appeal to a much wider group of people and players who have enjoyed more gentle puzzle adventures like Toki Tori, Box Boy, Inside, Limbo, and Portal.

Having a target audience in mind is a great way to keep your design on track. And of course, there are ways to appeal to a broader audience, too. If you've made a really hard game, you could chuck in an assist mode. If you've made a really easy game, you could put in optional harder content or post-game stuff. And finally, don't be afraid to start stuff from scratch. When you're making a level, there's a lot of discovery involved, and that usually ends up with you accumulating a lot of fluff and other garbage as you're figuring out what this level even is.

My recommendation, then, is to start the level again but with the knowledge you have acquired while doing that rushed first draft. You will no doubt end up with a much more elegant and coherent version of the level. I mean, I always do this with episodes of Game Maker's Toolkit. The script goes through five or six different revisions before I hit record. Why wasn't I doing this with the level design? So, I came back from GDC with loads of motivation, great ideas for where to take the game next, and really bad jet lag.

I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who said hi or hung out with me at GDC. It was amazing to meet so many people who watch Game Maker's Toolkit, participate in the game jam, or are following me here on this game development journey. It was even cool to meet that one guy who kept showing me his NFTs. Cool dude, you're killing it, bro. I was also just made to feel like part of this wonderful community of game makers, and so I can't wait to go back next year with hopefully maybe a finished game or something much closer to being done than it is now.

Until then, my next job is to take another step back and make a demo that explores even more basic, fundamental concepts of my game, and then get that demo in front of people in my key target audience. For now, if you want to play any of the three demos I described in this video, they're available for free on itch.io. I'm not taking any more feedback on these demos, but it might be interesting to see how the game is coming along.

Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you again soon.