Playtesting stories

Oh, the French! is not groundbreaking in any way, and it wasn't meant to be, but it has a story and style that simply isn't very accessible. I chose this because it was a small game that I could fully make myself and take through the design loop. Eventually I got to playtesting and...

How do you playtest "art" really? If I am expressing my true self, does it really matter how others interpret it? Yes! First of all, I don't believe in the idea of a "true self". How many constructs like culture, personality, and time period do we remove before we reach that true self or are they all part of it? But I digress...

However, I do believe that there are ideas that need to be expressed. Luckily, there are infinite ways to express the same thing even for a very specific idea. Rephrasing it in a more approachable way is often the right choice.

The most important part of playtesting is knowing what you are testing. For Oh, the French!, it was the atmosphere of the game as well as the ending. I asked on r/interactivefiction for feedback on my story, and even though Reddit is usually a terrible place for it, I got really lucky with one very kind player.

The feedback mostly concerned the ending as the player wanted influence over it and the game was frustrating that. It came on too fast and was inevitable, which felt bad. At first I was dismayed because that was the whole point of the game.

Thankfully, there are no real problems in feedback, only opportunities for more creative solutions. It helped me see that I had created a rude awakening, like throwing open the curtains to a midday sun. What I needed was a slow dawning. The same midday was coming, but gradual is more gentle on the eyes.

So I introduced a finer gradient toward the ending, which I think made the game more successful.