The Still of the Night Causes a Storm in the Mind

When you’re developing games it can hurt when you spend a few weeks or months on something only to have other people scoff at your creation. In my early years this really hurt my feelings. Actually, even today it doesn’t “feel good” when other people don’t get what you’re trying to communicate with a game. I often feel like a screaming infant whose parents just don’t comprehend what I’m trying to communicate with my goo-goo-gah-gah’s. It can make you feel quite disconnected from the rest of the world when you think something’s cool and no one else agrees.

The way that I deal with this is to consider play testers what I call “The Human Compiler”. The point of this is that you don’t get your feelings hurt when a programming compiler throws an error. No, instead you simply go to line N and change the code so that it works. When you get people playing your game for the first time there are going to be “Human Compiler Errors”. As with any other compiler the solution is simple, go to the figurative line N and fix it.

The biggest issue is that human beings aren’t discreet like a machine language compiler so you have to use your human judgment and read between the lines a little. Once you get past the “hurt feelings” part though it becomes pretty easy to read people’s feedback and trace the true root of the “Human Compiler Error”. The realization that people play testing your game is just another compiler is the most important piece of the puzzle here. Don’t get disheartened just take it all in, get a gut reading on everyone’s combined input, and then get back to work!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 12:20 am and is filed under Development, Introspective, Pholosophical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.