Feedback, feedback, feedback

In order to make a compelling game you need to get as much feedback as possible. Of course it’s easier said than done. Personally, I’ve always had trouble soliciting feedback for my projects. Today I’m going to touch on a few things I’ve learned about how to gather feedback. It’s too late for me to implement most of these things in my current game, Shade, but hopefully it will be useful for your game.

Release Early, Release Often

That’s how they do it in the open source world and that’s how you should do it with your game. If you’re working with Slick than release a prototype as soon as possible to the Slick forums and then work to keep the thread alive. Start by listening to what people are saying and then implementing some of their suggestions. Then go back and update the thread. Be sure to tell everyone that you’ve listened to and implemented some of their feedback and then solicit their help again. I think that this guy did a good job at this.

Be specific, I Hate to Think

It’s not enough to simply start a thread for feedback. In most cases you’ll find that people respond to general inquiries with general answers. If you ask, “Tell me what you think about my work so far” people will respond with “It’s good” or something similar. Personally, I find such feedback next to useless. If you do too then get much more specific. For instance, if you just added some new powerup ask the thread what they think about it. Then respond to their feedback and update the thread with a new question.

Broader Testing

The Slick forums are a great place to get some feedback early on in your game’s development. However the fact is that it’s a relatively small community. If you really want broader play testing than you’re going to need to find a larger audience. There are two good ways to do this. The first is to join some other forums and start threads there. Here are some I’ve come across:

• Indie Gamer Forums
• iDev Games
• TIG Source

Obviously, registering with these forums and starting parallel threads follows the same model as outlined above. If you want to really rock the boat, though, you can adopt my second suggestion. Implement a feedback mechanism in-game! It’s really easy, I promise.

In-game Feedback

For Shade I have implemented this feature in the following manner. In-game you can click on a button which fill fire the browser. The browser will load a page with a web form asking for feedback. The user can fill out the form and submit it to let me know what he thinks. I’ll show you how I got things to work — it wouldn’t be hard to adopt my highscore implementation to have the game post to the server without actually firing up a browser, too.

For starters go and download the Bare Bones Browswer Launcher. This simple library will handle the work of actually launching the browser. After that you need to write something like:

BareBonesBrowserLaunch.openURL(FEEDBACK_URL);

in your game. In my case I have it fire whenever a certain button is clicked. Easy right? Next you need to implement a web form. I’ve opted to do so in PHP with a database as the backend. Here’s the interesting parts:

/* Attempt to read in data submitted by the user. */
$rating = @$_POST['rating'];
$comments = @$_POST['comments'];
$contact = @$_POST['contact'];
$dbh = new PDO($dsn, $user, $pass);

$q = 'INSERT INTO `feedback` (rating, comments, contact) VALUES (?, ?, ?)';
$stmt = $dbh->prepare($q);
$stmt->bindParam(1, $rating, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$stmt->bindParam(2, $comments, PDO::PARAM_STR);
$stmt->bindParam(3, $contact, PDO::PARAM_STR);

$stmt->execute();

The above will submit the form’s data to the database using PDO. There’s a little more to it to display the right stuff, but you can read it in full here.

A few comments. If you clicked to see the example web form then you’ll notice that I have default values for most of the fields. I won’t say that my format is perfect but I do think it’s critical that you make the form as easy to submit as possible. In my case it’s possible to simply hit enter immediately if you agree with all the defaults, and I think that’s the level of simplicity needed to get people to actually submit feedback.

Also note that such a form plays a very different role in the game’s life cycle than the methods touched on above. Whereas submitting your work for feedback on a forum allows you to get feedback as you develop the game this last method produces feedback after the game is complete. Obviously this means you can’t use it to fine tune your gameplay design. That said, I think it can be valuable in a different way for two reasons. First, it can provide a distinct perspective which is useful for work on your next game. Second, because it has the potential to produce a great deal more feedback if architected correctly.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I hope to see feedback menus in your next game!

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