How to give good game dev feedback

bscotchAdam

Be specific
Games are crazy beasts with hundreds or thousands of inter-dependent parts. With this many parts working together, it is necessarily true that the developers cannot possibly have envisioned every scenario. Therefore your feedback needs to be specific enough that the developer can either reproduce what you saw or reason through why you saw it. For example, include details like what buttons you pressed right before something happened, where you were in the game world, what other things were also present, how long between when you did something and when you got that result, and so on. The more information you give, the more that can be done with it!

Aside from obvious problems like bugs, you may also have thoughts on the feel of the game. It's much harder to be specific about feelings, but do your best and explain why you think you feel that way.

Be concise
Developers are busy. We're always juggling a hundred bugfixes while simultaneously trying to move the game forward. So while we need to know about all of the problems, and need to know all relevant information to understand those problems, any extraneous information will slow down development. You don't have to be polite, with long-winded poetic sentences.

So instead of: "Yo, I was, like, diving way down in the deeps and then HOLY CRAP I got this awesome HAMMER but I wasn't sure if I wanted it. I switched anyway, 'cuz, you know, Hammers, amiright? So anyway, I was fighting Pete and then, WHAM, I killed him but then Tak disappeared and I was all WHAAAAT!??"

Say something like: "Tak disappeared when Pete killed with Hammer."

Try to break it
As a developer, you'll know exactly how to play your game. But your players won't, and they will do things you didn't plan for. When helping with testing a game, then, try to find the limits of what the game allows. More importantly, try to get past the limits. If you can make the game break, another player can too, and that other player will be a jerk and drop a 1-star review on Google Play. The developers will want to fix that problem before it goes live.

Provide solutions
While you may not be a developer, providing a solution with a problem you've identified will make your feedback better. Your solution might not work, but coming up with one will force you to more carefully state the problem, and will help to clear up confusion when we try to understand what the problem was.

Break up your observations into categories
A list of precise observations is much more useful than one long observation that takes into account multiple systems. Using categories helps you to notice things in the first place, and also makes your feedback much more precise and helpful. Example categories include:

1. User interface: Menus, heads-up-displays (HUDS), on-screen buttons, and the like. Could you navigate them? Were they nice looking?
2. Animation: For each character, does the animation seem smooth? Did they do things that seemed unnatural (when they shouldn't have)?
3. Art: Were the art styles consistent for different in-game items? Were there any art assets that you particularly do or do not like?
   
4. Juice: "Juice" refers to any aspect of the game that is purely for show but that makes it feel really good. What felt good about the game? What didn't? Is there some game aspect that needs juice?
5. Mechanics: "Mechanics" are how you interact with the game. In fact they are the game. Do you get results that make sense when you click/tap things? Did you have trouble figuring out what to do? Did you think you understood something only to have it do something unexpected?
6. Audio: How are the sound effects and music? Are they too loud/soft? How are transitions between musical pieces? Do in-game objects and creatures make reasonable sounds?
   
7. Bugs: Anything that seems broken. A subset of all other categories.
   
8. Balance: Is the game too hard or slow? Too easy or fast? Did you get bored? Is there enough to do?
   

This stuff is super important if you are developing a game (with a team or by yourself), or if you are alpha/beta testing a game for another group (like us!). Add your thoughts in the comments!

cmanred

Super helpful and hilarious example sentence. My wife looked at me like I was crazy laughing out of nowhere.

JoeyMaru

I will keep all of these in mind while playing. Downloading it now.  

MeaKitty

Question: obviously you want bug reports when they happen. You asking for feedback along the way or just at the end of the 10 days?

 Or should we look at maybe a report every 3 days (or less? ) on our general feeling of things?

Want to give you good information without overloading y'all.

bscotchseth

Any time you think there's something we should know, just hit the "Feedback" button we've placed in the bottom-right corner and send it our way! No worries about overloading us, so long as it's all useful!

bscotchAdam

You should see the list of issues we give to Seth EVERY SINGLE MORNING.

MeaKitty

Does it include problems like "you smell funny" or is it actual game related bugs?

JoeyMaru

Hey dudes!

EDIT:
I made a new discussion for a bug I found before logging in. I wanted to keep it more organized, so I took it out of here and added it in the bugs forum.

bscotchAdam

Ack! As long as you made it in. The login is a bit temporary, as it will change a lot with the full Bscotch ID implementation. You can post this kind of stuff in the new thread Alpha feedback!

Duh83

I think I missed signing up for the alpha,  is there still a chance to help out or no?  I can use the above guidelines to help make the game better

bscotchAdam

@duh8383‌ PMing you.

Duh83

thanks! i think i filled everything out and then signed up for the alpha testing. anything else?

cmanred

Soo...I can't tame any pets. With that being said am I able to get milk for nitro?

bscotchAdam

You can't? As in there is a bug, or you haven't succeeded at the minigame?

bscotchsam

@cmanred have you updated? We fixed that bug you thankfully reported last night with the creature taming crash.

cmanred

Just did update forgot to check. Now I'm Gunna have a bunch. I've gotten pretty good at minigame. Thx @BscotchAdam‌ and @Bscotchsam

Kiwicat4444

JoeyMaru said:

I will keep all of these in mind while playing. Downloading it now.  

Wait a sec ... did I miss something ? I think I signed up for alpha but I didn't get any info

B3A5T

Wat is happening!? "Downloading it now"??? Could someone possibly explain...

bscotchseth

B3A5T said:

Wat is happening!? "Downloading it now"??? Could someone possibly explain...

First round of alpha testing is underway!

B3A5T

Can anyone test it?? if so, how?

bscotchseth

Nope! We had a bunch of people apply for alpha testing a while back, and we grabbed just a handful of them for this first round. But STAY TUNED for more alpha and beta invites in the near future!

Ulnarevern

Does the Alpha participants will have access to the beta "by default" or will it require an application? I was wondering, is the feedback you have now correct (regarding the "rules")?

bscotchAdam

As to the beta, access will not quite be by default. Those who are most engaged during the alpha (played lot, discussed things productively on the forums, gave useful feedback) will most likely be invited to the beta, unless our goals for that test depart dramatically from what we are currently envisioning. Those in the alpha with little participation, little useful feedback, or with comments suggesting unrealistic expectations from us (especially since this is an alpha test) will not be invited back.

We may also need to run a test between the alpha and beta, with access only for the most engaged alpha testers who made it to the bug during this test, since it looks like many aspects of progression through the bog will need to be re-worked and re-tested.

These tests both generate and require a LOT of data, and so we have to make sure that what we collect is of high quality!

B3A5T

Will future tests be announced on the forums?? I would love to be involved!!

bscotchAdam

@B3A5T‌ YEP!

cmanred

True the bawg is crazy hard with the balance. Which I see u guys r on top of already. I have been trying to find the items for second trowel but it's really...hard.

Ulnarevern

I won't be able to give much feedback on the bawg since I haven't spend a lot of time in it. The beginning didn't seem so unbalanced to me though.

MeaKitty

I had so much trouble with the Bawg. Mostly trying to hunt down things I needed to make new tools and workstations. A lot of what I needed was only available during the night, and if not it was so rare to find I'd get bored and either quit or wander off. My map was so full of gravestones I could barely make out the terrain. XD but it was totally a blast and I enjoyed every minute of it. Can't wait to see how things progress with the beta.

Ulnarevern

That's the problem, I haven't play enough in the bawg to see the problems (appart that I understood why it is a "Nightmare" since the night creature of the bawg were awfully powerful)

MeaKitty

Yeah, even with the 3rd or 4th tier of weapons and armor from the Bawg machines, I was still getting one-shot-ed at random by some of the creatures. I should have at least been able to run away by that stage. No big deal, just a matter of tweaking damage counts, attack damage, and HP. I'm sure they'll weigh them all up based on feedback and tweak it so it's still difficult, but not hardly as impossible. 

From a dev point of view this is the reason you need testers. They knew all the creatures and creations they put into the game, so when they were running through it they knew how to get around things and probably couldn't even see the difficulty they'd created. Having us run through it blindly meant we were bound to find it. ^_^;;

bscotchAdam

@MeaKitty‌ Exactly! We frequently find ourselves saying "this is too easy..." before taking a step back to remember that we made it, have playested the crap out of it, and therefore have a super-skewed perspective on how difficult it should be.

We collected a ton of data on creature fights, since those are the hardest to balance. Haven't looked it it yet, but we hope that the data will point us in the right direction for balance.