Hi, everybody. Welcome back. My name is Matthew Boyle from www.langaugecardgames.com, and we’re talking about how to go from having no card game to selling your first card game. In this video, we’re going to talk about testing your game that you’re designing.
I think this is a rather obvious point, but let’s just breeze through it really quickly. You need to be testing your game before you start trying to sell it. You need to make sure the game functions really well. You need to play with different types of people. You need to play it enough times to see that it works flawlessly, and you need to iron out the things that are not going right. And when you play with different people, when you’re testing the game, I think one useful thing is that, although you’ll be there with the people to test, let them try to play your game without any instruction from you. So give them a copy of the rules, which also, by the way, you need to have very nice and clear and detailed rules typed up. Give them a copy of the rules or maybe just a quick tutorial video, and say, “Okay, I want to see if you can open this and play it pretty well and have fun without me guiding through and holding your hand step by step.” Obviously, you’re the designer; you know very well how it works, but you need to see its effect upon other people that you test with.
That’s something I could have definitely done better, in hindsight, but I just want to tell you that in advance. You need to test this game, and you need to let people try to play it without too much input from you and without too much hand-holding from you. You need to take notes and you need to write down what’s not going smoothly, what questions people have that are coming up, and then reiterate or improve the rules and the game flow of how the game functions and operates.
Another thing you can do to save yourself some money, especially in the very early stages of the game testing, is you can just write onto index cards or cut poster board or even just cut paper or use post-it notes, and you can just play with those as your cards. Then you can erase, write a new rule, or make a totally new card, and that’s a cheap way to test how the game is working.
After you do that for a little while, you may want to buy just one or two copies to test with so that it looks more professional and you get a real feel. I mean, for me, that was important, as I like to really see how it’s really going to look on the real cards. So I wouldn’t test too long with just post-it notes or index cards. I really was dying to get a copy of it into my hands and test with that, so I have several decks that look professional, but they have mistakes; they have problems, and later I just used that as fodder for other things. Those obviously don’t go to customers.
Okay, that’s it for this video where we talk about the importance of testing. If you want to discuss how important it is to test your game with people, and if you have any additional advice or tips related to that, let’s talk about it in the comments section below. Until next time, I’m Matthew Boyle, and thank you so much for watching.
