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[ProgramGamer]

I am a person who tries to be honest with himself so when I make a thing and I play it I can usually tell that it's mediocre.

[s0]

I am a person who tries to be honest with himself so when I make a thing and I play it I can usually tell that it's mediocre.

yeah but how can you tell whether it's fun/interesting to play? i never enjoy playing my own games because i play them so much for testing purposes, which is 1. not a mode of play to conducive to entertainment (or "edification" or watever the goal is) and also 2. i get sick of playing the same bits over and over again which kills any potential for real enjoyment right off the bat.

i mean i can ofc tell if things work as intended and stuff, but i can't answer the question of whether i, as a player, would actually enjoy playing my own game.  

[battlerager]

To OP:

• Rungeons & Tageons: 2 - 4 Player splitscreen game of tag. Top down 2d-graphics. There were 9 rooms in a 3x3 grid, only different in their door placements. I refused to add a button to use the powerups, so they all auto-activated on running over them. It was a mess.
• Battle for Dekadia (Warcraft 3 map): It was like DotA, before I knew what that was, but a strict 1v1 in a separated area of the map while the other players were supposed to fight a "Normal" strategy game with asymetric factions, split in 2 teams. They could then call on their team's "god" (the player in the separated area) to temporarily join the fray on the normal map, with massively better stats and skills than the normal units. Taking a faction out of the game would affect the "heaven" battle, and only the heaven battle could decide the game's outcome. It sounded cool but was an impossible task, the pace and duration of the 1v1 could never match up with the loooong drawn out battles on the normal map and so on.
• Dopterra Tactics I wanted to make a character-based top down turn based tactics game, heavily dependant on team composition and positioning. Then I realized Krosmaster already existed. Oops.

Now, for this:

yeah but how can you tell whether it's fun/interesting to play? i never enjoy playing my own games because i play them so much for testing purposes, which is 1. not a mode of play to conducive to entertainment (or "edification" or watever the goal is) and also 2. i get sick of playing the same bits over and over again which kills any potential for real enjoyment right off the bat.

i mean i can ofc tell if things work as intended and stuff, but i can't answer the question of whether i, as a player, would actually enjoy playing my own game.  

Basically, if I tell someone about it and they genuinely want to play it, I know it's good. Or if I start it and still have some glimpse of giddyness I can feel in myself. Or if I can remember a moment where I was not already used to the game and 100% convinced about it.

[Pfotegeist]

I like how educational games are ecologically friendly, but I hate how they tend to fall just par of textbook problems when we know typing text and checking boxes are the least interactive player experience in all of gaming media.

[gimymblert]

I made an hypothesis that "good game design™" is dead, because anytime you edict a rules a game that broke it and work emerged!

Game should:
- have challenge (walking simulator, animal crossing, minecraft creative)
- have good control (qwop, surgeon simulator, octodad)
- be constantly engaging (idle game, dayZ)
- not have bug (goat simulator, skyrim)
- not have story (walking simulator, telltale, adventure game)
- have story (tetris, candy crush)
- be complex (cookie clicker)
- be simple  (dwarf fortress)
- be fair (survival games, masocore)
etc ...

[Cobralad]

an oculus rift game where you need to look at the mirror   
its name is






spot a goast                                                                                                             

[Alex Higgins]

Now, for this:

yeah but how can you tell whether it's fun/interesting to play? i never enjoy playing my own games because i play them so much for testing purposes, which is 1. not a mode of play to conducive to entertainment (or "edification" or watever the goal is) and also 2. i get sick of playing the same bits over and over again which kills any potential for real enjoyment right off the bat.

i mean i can ofc tell if things work as intended and stuff, but i can't answer the question of whether i, as a player, would actually enjoy playing my own game.  

Basically, if I tell someone about it and they genuinely want to play it, I know it's good. Or if I start it and still have some glimpse of giddyness I can feel in myself. Or if I can remember a moment where I was not already used to the game and 100% convinced about it.

The way I see it, there are two main problems with self-playtesting:
1) There's a huge discrepancy between developer knowledge and player knowledge. Even if you design a great game and experience those moments of "giddyness," your ability to enjoy the game still depends upon your intimate knowledge of the underlying systems. While it is obviously possible (and necessary!) to share that knowledge with players through training and tutorials, it is impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of your own training, as you can't learn what you already know. If you fail to fully teach the game's mechanics to the player, they're less likely to understand what's going on and experience those giddy moments. In this situation, the game is worse than you think it is.
2) To paraphrase Silbereisen, playing your own game over and over gets pretty stale. Your own ability to determine how fun your game is gets impaired over time. This doesn't require much explanation. In this situation, the game is better than you think it is.

There is often a ton of overlap between what I enjoy in my games and what other people enjoy. And if your game is conventional, simple, and short enough, it's easier to be able to judge its quality for yourself.

However, as soon as you do anything experimental, complicated enough to require a tutorial, or big enough that you've been developing it for at least a couple of months, it becomes really hard to be able to evaluate the quality of your own work. I've only ever made one game where my expectation of audience response nearly fully corresponded to reality - everything else has been a surprise!

[ProgramGamer]

Usually the reason why I can tell when something is good or bad is because I'm good at keeping track of what I should know from the perspective of a first time player. Like, I can tell when the level doesn't tell you enough about a situation, or when a level is too easy for the degree of progress that the player has made. I've exercised this enough that I can make pretty decent levels even though I've only ever released one title (my ludum dare 32 participation).

[Alex Higgins]

Usually the reason why I can tell when something is good or bad is because I'm good at keeping track of what I should know from the perspective of a first time player. Like, I can tell when the level doesn't tell you enough about a situation, or when a level is too easy for the degree of progress that the player has made. I've exercised this enough that I can make pretty decent levels even though I've only ever released one title (my ludum dare 32 participation).

Right, as I said, it's definitely easier to do that with shorter, simpler games (ie a jam game). But, ultimately, there's no way to verify whether your own feelings about your game are correct without watching other people play it. You can get pretty close sometimes, but there is always something you'll have never anticipated. I've finished seven games over the past three years (and dozens of piece-of-crap games as a teenager before that) and my perception of my work has never been totally accurate, no matter how much I try to imagine that I'm a first time player. There are some things you can clearly figure out (introducing two game mechanics at the same time will almost always confuse the player, for example), but you will always miss something.

Okay, here's an example. In a Ludum Dare entry of mine, Digital Toilet World, the player has to periodically escort their monster companion to a toilet so he can relieve himself. When the monster has to poop, a bar fills at the top of the screen. If the bar is full, and the monster hasn't reached the toilet, he poops on the ground. In this scenario, I knew I had created a basic system that featured the building and release of tension, which players usually find compelling.

What surprised me was how compelling some of my friends found the mechanic when they played the game. For me, I felt little emotion as I took the monster to the bathroom. Knowing the game's systems inside and out, I knew how to play correctly so that the monster would never poop on the ground. I always knew whether each poop scenario would end well or poorly for me. However, my friends did not have this knowledge, and for them, getting their monsters to the toilet was a lot more exciting for them. They would yell at the computer screen as the bar neared fullness. I knew that I created a system that would, more likely than not, be engaging, but I was totally taken off guard by how much people actually got out of it.

However, other people commented on the game during the jam and said the poop mechanic added nothing to the game. Go figure.

Adopting the perspective of a first time player is only the minimum you can do to gauge audience response. There's really no substitute for live playtestng. Of course, live playtesting isn't always possible, especially during a jam.

I really would liked to have played BOWAB, by the way, but I don't have a gamepad :_(

[ProgramGamer]

Go figure, I should probably add keyboard controls at this point since so many people complained about that.

[baconman]

COMPUTER GAME PLAYER SIMULATOR 2015.

[diegzumillo]

COMPUTER GAME PLAYER SIMULATOR 2015.

haha like surgeon simulator you have control of the characters' hands and fingers, while you find yourself sitting on a PC with a mouse and keyboard. The screen could run some emulator so we have a library of games to play.

This is awful. Well done!

[Dacke]

Chess MMO

[ProgramGamer]

Isn't that just online chess?

[oahda]

Every piece is an individual player. Two teams. You heard it here first.

I kind of want to do this now as a rudimentary exercise in more advanced network programming than I've ever done before...

[Alex Higgins]

COMPUTER GAME PLAYER SIMULATOR 2015.

haha like surgeon simulator you have control of the characters' hands and fingers, while you find yourself sitting on a PC with a mouse and keyboard. The screen could run some emulator so we have a library of games to play.

This is awful. Well done!

Reminds me of something kinda similar to that, actually: a Sanic game in which you play as a guy playing on an arcade machine, and you propel the character by clicking on the arcade machine's controls: http://gamejolt.com/games/sanic-allstar-runners-arcade-edition/80278

[gimymblert]

COMPUTER GAME PLAYER SIMULATOR 2015.

[diegzumillo]

COMPUTER GAME PLAYER SIMULATOR 2015.

 

The worst of all? "This game has been greenlit by the community". WHY?? I can even understand the "dev" point of view, he wasted 100 bucks for a quick joke. Some would say it's abusing the system, myself included, but I don't even mind something to giggle about while browing steam greenlight games. But it has been greenlit. By the community. People voted "Yes, I would pay money for this". It's the people voting that perplexes me. Is this mass retardation or am I missing something? I must be missing something.

[JWK5]

A bad idea is any FPS that thought giving a team -1 point for suicides was a good penalty idea.

I remember playing Halo 2 once my friend and I joined a game and we wound up in a fairly empty game on a team with these two jackasses who's opponent was some little kid. They were just mercilessly ganging up on the kid so we let the kid kill us a few times to bump up his kill count a bit and then we started jumping off the cliffs to our deaths over and over to the point where we bottomed out our kills faster than our teammates could earn them and the kid ended up beating us 5 to 0.

The only thing that was more priceless than hearing what appeared to be two grown men whining and throwing a tantrum because we were ruining their opportunity to virtually pummel a child was the fact that the kid didn't realize what had happened, he thought he beat us legitimately so he started talking shit which only infuriated our two asshole teammates even more. After some more kicking and screaming they promptly quit out and we congratulated the kid on playing so badass that he beat all 4 of us by himself. It was great.

Anyways, if you penalize a player's team for that player accidentally dying (as in due to the environment) you inadvertently give the player the tools they need to punish their teammates. On the other hand, if you don't penalize them at all they can use suicide as a cheap means to deny their enemies a kill (for example, suicide-running with a cooked grenade in CoD or diving off a cliff before they can shoot you).

[gimymblert]

Well smash bros does it