Hi all you lovely designers.

I'm a Honours Student of Computer Games Software Development at the Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland.

For my honours project I am looking into the use of Player Visualization Tools (tracking and displaying information about a player's game session) in playtesting Video Game Levels to locate flaws and exploits in the design. For the project I am looking for Game Designers and Level Designers to give their input on the subject.

So I pose a few questions for any of you who have designed levels for games. Have you ever used visualization tools when playtesting the levels? If not then what methods do you use? Do you think there is anything to be gained by monitoring the direct actions of the players in a game or is there other, more effective ways to do gain information?

I'm hoping to get a good discussion on this subject as to see exactly what designers would look for in a visualization tool. Anything you can bring to the discussion would aid me greatly in my project.

Cheers!

Alexander Clowes

So I pose a few questions for any of you who have designed levels for games. Have you ever used visualization tools when playtesting the levels? If not then what methods do you use? Do you think there is anything to be gained by monitoring the direct actions of the players in a game or is there other, more effective ways to do gain information?

The single most important tool is the replay. If you can play back exactly what was going on throughout the simulation as the player played, then you have 90%.

The other 10% is video footage of the player, ideally frontal, and his/her hands, synced to the replay.

If I have those things, I can fully guage the player's reaction to what he/she saw and heard, which is most of the way there.

I suspect you mean something slightly different though; were you thinking of instrumentation for the developers to do in-house playtesting? I'll give that some thought, though generally there's nothing like real playtesting...

An interesting project might be to choose a game that has fixed-interval simulation, and implement replay recording for it. I'm sure if you did that for Source (assuming they haven't already done it) you could get a job from Valve for it

By visualization tools, I mean tools that track information inside the game (such as player position, death positions, weapon use etc) and then represents that information using graphics (such as heat maps, scatter maps and the like).

So you say that the replay of the game is important, along with footage of player reactions and the like, but how would you use it? Would you just watch through all the playtests fully? That would take quite a bit of time to do as it there would be a lot of information being displayed and require a lot of effort in locating key flaws in an area (particularly when testing multiplayer level maps with a lot of players testing it at once).

By visualization tools, I mean tools that track information inside the game (such as player position, death positions, weapon use etc) and then represents that information using graphics (such as heat maps, scatter maps and the like).

Facepalm!

This is brilliant, and I totally get what you mean now.

I was thinking more along the lines of the HL2 playtesting wherein the datasets were not so huge that they couldn't just sit down and watch all the replays.

So, if you have a way to run a replay through a simulator, and collect any data you want from that, then aggregate that data somewhere and construct scattermaps for player movement, and heatmaps for player death, that is a very clever first step!

In strategy games, generating some kind of tech progression report would be interesting.

Also, have a look at the 1K project, it's an inspired piece of game art that ties in with what you're saying.

I'll have a think about this now that I know what you meant, bbl