Playtesting Solo
This article is part of the Indie Game Developer Network's blog series. The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of the IGDN or its members.
I’ve only recently started my dive into solo games. To me, solo games mostly looked like creative writing with extra steps. When I play tabletop rpgs, I am looking more for the game aspect, so I was not interested in them for the longest time.
A fan of my game, Punk Galactic, mentioned the mechanics would work well for solo play, so I took that as the catalyst to start my dive into solo play games. I started with a look at Ironsworn, to see what the solo game hype was all about. I found I enjoyed it more than I thought I would and that there was more “game” in solo games than I originally gave them credit for, but still not enough for me.
Playtesting solo has a few aspects I needed to adapt to from my experience with playtesting with a group.
The Hangups and the Anxiety
During my first playtest, in addition to the standard questions like, “am I having fun?”, I was also asking a ton of other questions relating to what other people would think.
“Would other people also have fun doing this?”, “Is this the right way to have fun here?”, “Should I force players to do this?” etc.
I let these thoughts and hang-ups get to me. My original goal with the system was to make a more gamey system that I would have fun solo roleplaying with, but all these thoughts made me question whether I was doing solo rpgs “right”.
A lot of this anxiety came from solo rpgs being a one perspective game. In traditional tabletop rpgs, I had other player’s reactions to build off. I could hear their perspective of how they enjoyed the game and that is often how I focus my adjustments. That feedback was lacking, that “how were my players enjoying my game” perspective was missing, because I was the only player.
On the opposite side, since there is only one perspective to account for, the player perspective, the number of considerations I needed to make was significantly less.
Playtest Goals are Forever
With the above lessons learned, I started a second round of playtesting and used standard playtesting goals as comparison points to make up for the lack of second perspective. Of course I still checked if I was having fun, but to make up for my lost feeling of the other people’s perspectives, I would substitute these metrics. The goals I used:
I wanted a quickstart that was comprehensive.
I wanted to ease the player into the mechanics of the system.
I wanted to show the fun of character progression through card upgrades.
I wanted to test the pre structured Mission style.
I accomplished all of the goals in the playtest and was subsequently disappointed. Something was missing, I was not sure what.
“The game does not feel like it is pushing the world wider or larger, I need to force myself to do so.”
“I’m not feeling surprised or discovering anything within the game.”
And so on and so forth. These all boil down to the following: the Mission structure did not have structure to tie it to a greater campaign, or even the next Mission.
The other issue did not come to light until after I was able to talk to a playtester about it. They had played the group version of the game, and mentioned how certain fun mechanics were missing from this version. I had cut those out because I did not want the game to be too overwhelming in the quickstart (goal 2 above). I think that made the solo version worse. So, I took these two points of feedback and did a rewrite of the quickstart with new lessons in mind.
Target Audience
When playtesting, it is always said you should have a target audience, and that target audience should be a single person or small group of people. If you are making a kids game, you aren’t making a game for all kids, you are making a game for your kids, for example.
Well in this case, I knew the target audience from the beginning, I just kind of forgot about him. It was me the whole time. So considering my own desires, I put back the complexity, added secrets to inspire new missions, and redid the entire quickstart.
This playtesting is not over, in fact I am still in the middle of it, looking for more feedback from more players, but I am much happier with my current iteration because I took these lessons to heart and embraced some of the unique aspects of solo play in my playtesting process.
This article is part of the Indie Game Developer Network’s blog series. The content of this article reflects the views of but one member of the IGDN. This IGDN blog article is brought to you by Brandon Gutowski of the C22 System. If you want to get in touch with the contributor he can be reached on Twitter at @c22system, on Facebook @PagodaGamesLLC, or visit their website at www.c22system.com.