Commercial games, those sold as consumer products for the primary purpose of business profit, are very different from educational and promotional games in a lot of ways. Two big factors separating the two are the need for different design goals, and the need for testing and refinement of the game to different goals. In this article we’re going to look at the testing phase and the particular educational and promotional concerns that need to be addressed then.
Testing is often thought of as a Beta or Gold phase process, but ideally it’s an inherent part of the entire process, from pre-production concepting and prototyping, through to post-release updates. There’s never a bad time for a critical look to improve things, though there can be inopportune times to fix stuff. Ideally with early and often testing we can head off problems before they exist, nip them in the bud and give ourselves the best opportunity to fix and realign things for optimum solutions. Often the best solutions take some thinking, so early identification of issues can help give longer timelines for solutions to develop. QA, or Quality Assurance, is a critical part of making a Good game. So what do we look for in QA when developing an educational or marketing video game?
Reliability
The biggest focus of any playtesting is making sure the game works. Reliability is job number one. Does the game crash? Do the features work? Is the game resolvable? This is the core of any testing, it’s gotta be able to work before it can work good. This is by no means special to promotional and educational games, but I’ve listed it here since it’s always top priority.
Age Appropriateness
With promotional and educational games there’s often a very specific audience. One of the keys to good QA for them is to approach testing with an age appropriateness lens. Promotional games will generally have a more loose range of age targets than educational games, but they both need to pay attention to the design and implementation of the game to ensure it’s as easy, accessible, and satisfying to the target age. For educational games this will also generally include curricular connections for specific grades. Age appropriateness covers a wide range of considerations. Control complexity, the need for precision movement in game, reaction times, reading times and comprehension, clarity of goals, depth of planning/strategy required, forgiveness, difficulty, text size, depth of customization, simplicity of actions and tasks are the most important issues to cover, but different genres and systems may introduce other important considerations. If the game exceeds the target range in these categories there’s a good change the target market will find it too challenging, uninteresting, inaccessible, or not fun and fail to engage with it as hoped. Undershooting the target can be a problem too, games made to simple, to dumbed-down, can be insulting, dull, childish, or uninteresting to the target. Thinking through these aspects of age appropriateness is an important job for a designer and a tester, though there’s nothing like playtesting with your target market to really know if you’ve found the balance or not.
Abandonment & Wild Inputs
In physically installed games, like at promotional events, or in informal learning centres like museums and science centres, video games have to be designed appropriately to work with the space/event. One of the most important factors to consider is game abandonment. In the wild and chaotic settings of live events and attractions games can be abandoned as people are drawn away from the game by distractions, schedules, friends or other external causes. If a game is going to have good pickup it needs to be approachable. Abandoned games can be terrible for other people to try jump in on – they may not have any access to tutorials, may not be able to customize it to their liking, they may not understand the situation or goals, or other major issues. Good live public games need to be designed to handle being abandoned gracefully. One key tactic is to have the game reset itself if it doesn’t have any control inputs for a set amount of time. This needs to be able to reset the game from any of its game states and render a new clean gameplay option. Another big consideration is non-constructive play – what if an interloper tries to interfere with the game or a very young child simply starts slapping buttons or the screen? These wild inputs can crash games if they aren’t built to handle them. Ensuring that the game is robust enough and parses control inputs in sensible ways even when strained like this is an important consideration for games installed in public spaces.
Visibility & Accessibility
Games are only impactful if a person plays them. Making sure they have the appeal and approachability needed for the target market is vital! First appearances count, so how does a game present itself? This includes two phases to consider – the approach, or before the game is being played, and in-game, how it looks while being played.
When a game isn’t being played it should still be able to convey a sense of what it is about or what vibe gameplay will provide. An ideal game will have a start screen that while idle will still provide animation of some amount of game content so the prospective player can assess what genre, style and theme the game has in passing, at least to some degree. A game in a busy public space needs to be able to “sell” itself to the prospective audience.
Once a player engages the game we have a very different set of considerations. Now we have to consider how the game is presenting itself and critical information to the player. First we need to worry about legibility. Is the information we’re presenting easily readable and discernible? Text needs to be big enough to read, it needs to have enough contrast from the background to be legible. Are icons, gauges and other non-text indicators clear and obvious? This leads into questions of accessibility – are visual indicators on screen long enough to read? Can players control the speed of text? Can they choose other languages? How do colour blind people interact with the game? Deaf people? Can blind people even play the game? Not everything is going to be able to be accessible for all people, but it’s worth putting some thought into these issues, the bigger the audience the better for a impact and value from a project! This issue is very complex, too much to discuss at length here, but know it exists and research, especially getting information from target populations, can be very valuable for increasing the accessibility of a project.
Tutorials, Learning and Difficulty Curves
Often promotional and educational games are sudden unique opportunities to play, sometimes without a second chance as people wait in line to try them. This means they have a uniquely challenging need to be accessible and obvious to players. Tutorials and tips are often vital to ensuring the audience know what to do and how so their experiences aren’t too frustrating. This can include tutorials explaining controls (“Press A to _”), components (“cherries are worth 100pts”), features (“bounce pads let you jump heigher) and principles of play (“avoid the red tiles”). It could include tip systems, like popups that give you some instruction specific to the local scenario, or sign posts the character can choose to read. Critically the levels need to be designed to provide the new player with an easy and sensible progression of skill with slowly introducing game features and components. The learning path of mastery in all the various skills within a game and how they are introduced and provided practice for is called the difficulty curve. Commercial games often rely on genre tropes and control standards to allow for higher skill levels at the beginning of a game. In educational and promotional games we often can’t rely on the audience knowing video games. Educational and Promotional games then need to have easier difficulty curves with very low bars to entry. Of course game professionals can have a very hard time testing for this with their given knowledge and habits. Testing with the target audience is often critical for truly understanding this.
Message & Impact
We’ve covered a lot about how the player can access and play the game, but assuming that all went well we can finally get to the point of it all – the message and impact of the game! Here we’re seeing if after all the concessions to accessibility and learning our core message still comes through. Does the game capture the feeling, convey the message, provide the experience that we aimed for? Is it on point for the audience we are aiming at? Do we see the impression, feeling, learning outcomes that we want? Can we enhance the effect and meaning? Commercial games rarely have to worry that much about this, if they are within a known genre, they likely provide at least a decent amount of the experience they set out for and will connect in some way with the audience. With educational and promotional game we’re often adding in layers of message and impact beyond this core game experience and need to pay additional attention to this measure of success. Commercial games have their own struggles in trying to appeal enough to be commercial hits, but educational and promotional games can be stretched in a much wider range of potential needs. Again testing with the target market can be an important tool to see if the impact is what’s expected.
The Bottom Line
Developing an educational or marketing game presents unique challenges to the development team. Here we’ve tried to give a glimpse into the myriad considerations that need to be tested, tweaked and adapted for to ensure the greatest project success. A good development team, means a good testing team. However good a development team is, they can never guess everything right from the start. Testing is about taking the assumptions that have to be made to get a project started and going back through them to find the right balance to match the audience reality.
If you’re looking to get a video game developed for educational, promotional or marketing purposes and you’re wondering how to make it the success it deserves to be, Massive Corporation provides free consultations. We’ll be happy to talk to you about your project and help you understand how your message can be developed for maximum impact. Our focus is on educational and promotional games and we know how to succeed. If we can help you out, drop us a line, we’ll be happy to talk!