Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

you. Developers handle each of these feedback streams differently, some placing
more or less emphasis on any one of the categories mentioned here.
As a developer, you must keep the licensor impressed with your handling of their
characters and worlds. You must develop the best publisher relationship possible.
They are your client, your partner in success or failure, and a source for future work
building more games. If you don’t deliver, they will find another developer. Feedback,
requests, criticisms, directions, and demands from each of the remaining categories
must be considered on a case-by-case basis. This is where ranking and priority based
on the substance of the feedback (and what it suggests about the playability of your
game) must be gauged and acted upon.
Managing Feedback
People seem to ask for the impossible on a regular basis. When this is clearly the case,
it falls by definition to the bottom of your feedback list, or maybe it’s not even entered
into your notes. How do you handle all of this information? I use a template set up in
Microsoft Excel to enter and track feedback from each of these disparate sources as it
gets directed toward the design and production team. This feedback is kept separate
from a bug database, unless the feedback given is itself an actual bug. In this case, a
full bug report is written and entered into the bug database.
Hopefully by now you realize that an enormous physical amount of feedback will
be coming at your design team. I’ve suggested a priority, ranking, and triage system
for handling it at the top level. At the same time, during development, there is a parallel
and more intimate feedback loop that exists. This loop focuses on the play feedback
discussed amongst the actual development team.
Development Team Feedback Loop
The programmers, artists, designers, testers, audio engineers, producers, and writers
all perform their craft, but they also test the game. They watch it come to life slowly,
day after day, for a couple of years (in some cases!). They are trying to guide the game
in the right direction—the direction established as the vision for the game. This process
itself becomes an interior feedback loop or team loop, and is probably the most powerful
one. If a team were to try to please everyone’s random request, the game would
never be completed—and wouldn’t work cohesively if it could be completed.
You have to filter through all of the extraneous feedback and reconcile it with the
team loop. This is rarely easy. The following are the kinds of issues that must be
addressed at the team loop level:
� Item placement needs work
� Item powers are not working as intended
C H A P T E R 7
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Quality Assurance and Play-Test Feedback