This post is part of the 2018 "If You Write It, They Will Come" AIF Writing Salon.
Games are an interactive medium. The final experience is a combination
of player choices and your writing. Unless you're experienced enough to
be able to anticipate how players will react to your game, you need to
playtest your game to find out if players are experiencing the game in
the way you intended.
For the first couple of playtests, your game will just a skeleton. It
will be playable but incomplete. You should use these playtests to find
missing parts of your game and fill them in. You should think of
alternate choices that players can make at different points in the game
and write the text for them.
For these later playtests, you should focus on refining how players
experience your game. You should play some of the other games and leave
comments about your experiences to help other authors and hopefully they
will do the same for you. When reading player feedback, you should
focus on their descriptions of how they felt while playing your game and
on any problems they encountered. You should then see if these
experiences match what you intended for your game. Keep in mind that
players are not game designers, so any suggestions they make for actual
changes to your game will often be wrong.
Just post any changes you want in the comments in the form of more transcripts or using more detailed instructions if necessary.
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