In today's competitive gaming landscape, quality playtesting is crucial for success, but many developers face the challenge of limited resources. With recently chatted with Huey Games, led by CEO and Creative Director Rob Hewson, on how they successfully utilized GoTestify's free tier to enhance their game development process for Hyper Sentinel Fusion, demonstrating that professional-grade playtesting is accessible to studios of all sizes.
How have you found using the GoTestify platform?
GoTestify has been central to playtesting Hyper Sentinel Fusion with our community. It is straightforward to setup and use, and has powerful tools and features to dig into the details of player sentiment and identify key insights to player behaviour.
How have the free capabilities helped you as an indie developer to run playtests?
As an indie developer the free tier on GoTestify is fantastic. We have a small but hugely passionate community, and we've been able to playtest builds with them on a monthly cadence without worrying about breaking the bank. Not only does this allow us to fine tune the game for our target audience, it also doubles as a marketing and community building tool.
Join our playtesting community: https://discord.gg/Hw2ySqM
What has been the most beneficial aspect of having GoTestify in your arsenal?
There is no substitute for watching a player tackle your game, and listening to their in-the-moment comments, emotions and feedback. We have also been able to selectively utilise the AI-powered sentiment analysis tools to focus in on key issues which is powerful.
You don't get the same raw, honest insights at in-person expos, and you can't rewind, rewatch and share what you are observing with the wider development team as you can with GoTestify
Rob Hewson, Huey Games
As you've been iterating your testing, what have you been focusing on each time?
Initially we spent a lot of time focusing on onboarding and signposting.
As a developer it never ceases to amaze you where people get stuck, or the signposting they miss which you thought was blindingly obvious.
There is absolutely no way we would have been able to iterate and fine-tune the onboarding for the game so rapidly and accurately without GoTestify. From there, we've been able to flesh out the core loop of the game, testing and iterating on each element as we go, while balancing and reacting to our community's ideas and insights.
For Hyper Sentinel Fusion, the stickiness of our game loops is fundamental, and GoTestify gives us the ability to continuously measure and respond to player engagement as we build out the content and test different features.
What changes have you been making across each iteration?
Typically it is a balance between delivering the next features of our development roadmap, and balancing and adjusting existing elements. Our community loves to post their high scores for each playtest, and one playtester found a clever exploit to massively inflate their score.
We discussed it with the community and came up with an elegant solution, implemented it, and tested it in the next iteration. We've tried out several different systems for enemy shield behaviour to find the right balance between challenge and frustration, and have sought to remove little frustrations and issues as we go. It's much better to fix-as-you-go than to try and tackle a mountain of issues later.
Key Takeaways
- Accessible Professional Tools: The free tier of 30 hours per month provides sufficient capacity for regular community playtesting sessions
- Community Integration: Seamless integration with existing community platforms like Discord
- Actionable Insights: Powerful tools for analyzing player behavior and sentiment
- Cost-Effective Development: Regular playtesting without breaking the bank
- Marketing Synergy: Playtesting doubles as a community-building and marketing tool