Best Practices for Testing and Refining Your ARG

Creating an alternate reality game (ARG) is an exciting and challenging endeavor. You put in countless hours developing the story, creating puzzles and clues, and designing the game mechanics. But before you can launch your game, it’s essential to test and refine it to ensure it’s a polished and engaging experience for your players. In this article, we’ll explore some best practices for testing and refining your ARG.

Start with a Solid Foundation

Before you can test and refine your ARG, you need to start with a solid foundation. This means developing a clear understanding of the story, game mechanics, and target audience. Without a solid foundation, it’s impossible to create an engaging and compelling experience for your players. It helps to define these things in writing and reference that writing throughout the process. This is often considered a Game Design Document, or G.D.D., in the Video Game development industry.

Make sure that your story is well-developed and that the game mechanics are clear and easy to understand. Also, ensure that your target audience is well-defined, and preferably.. the game is tailored to their interests and preferences.

Verify Everything Works

One of the first steps in the chain of testing is pretty straightforward. Make sure everything works as intended. Compare your encoded messages against multiple decoders. Run your steganographic puzzles through a few different sites. Try to find the most common tools your players will have at their disposal… And use them. If your puzzles don’t work, they won’t be solved. Once you know without a doubt that everything does work as you intended it to… It’s time to move on.

Recruit PlayTesters

One of the most effective ways to test and refine your ARG is to use playtesters. Playtesters are a group of people who test your game before it goes live, providing feedback and identifying any issues or problems.

When selecting playtesters, choose people who represent your target audience. This will give you a better understanding of how your game will be received by your actual players.

Do not create your game solely in a void. Let me repeat that: Do. Not. Create. Your. Game. Solely. In. A. Void.

Provide Clear Instructions and Guidance

Using playtesters (yes, we’re going to keep pushing the playtesters concept, because it’s very important) is crucial for testing and refining your ARG. Provide clear instructions and guidance to them to ensure they understand the rules of the game and how to progress through it. This will help you provide a smooth and engaging experience for your target players, once the game’s out in the wild.

Gather Feedback and Analyze the Data

One of the most important aspects of testing and refining your ARG is gathering feedback from those playtesters and analyzing the data. This feedback will help you identify any issues or problems with your game and make necessary changes before the game goes live.

When gathering feedback, be open to constructive criticism and be willing to make changes if necessary. Remember, the goal is to create a fun and engaging game for your players. Feedback is essential to achieving that goal.

Analyze the data you collect to identify patterns and trends. This can help you identify areas of the game that need improvement, as well as areas that are working well. Maybe they struggled with a particular clue and then flew through a following chunk of content. This is a fantastic bit of information that illustrates the balance (or lack thereof) between the initial difficulty, and the difficulty following.

Refine Your Game

After debugging your game to verify everything works, gathering feedback from the playtesters, and analyzing the data… it’s important to refine your game based on those efforts. This might involve making changes to the story, adjusting the difficulty of puzzles and clues, or tweaking the game mechanics.

Be prepared to make changes based on the feedback you receive. The goal is to create the best possible game for your players, and refining your game based on feedback is essential to achieving that goal.

Test Again and Continuously Improve

After making all the needed changes to your game, it’s important to test it again. This will help you ensure that the changes you’ve made are effective and that the game is in a more launch-ready state. Or, that the particular section you’ve just tested through is done, and you can move on.

Once your game is launched, continue to gather feedback and analyze data to make improvements. The best ARGs are constantly evolving and improving based on testing, and player feedback.

Conclusion

Testing and refining your alternate reality game is an essential part of the game design process. By starting with a solid foundation, incorporating, providing clear instructions and guidance, gathering feedback, analyzing data, refining your game, testing again, and continuously improving, you can create a polished and engaging experience for your players.

Remember, the key to creating a successful ARG is to put in the time and effort to test and refine your game. By following these best practices, you can create an engaging and memorable experience that your players will love.