Gather and reflect on player feedback

[jgbourque]

Why this task matters

After conducting playtesting sessions, it is important to gather all available feedback. You and your team members will be able to analyze the data and identify key areas for improvement. Together, you'll later create a prioritized task list to begin polishing your StoryQuest and move it closer to its final form.

Steps

1. Gather feedback from playtesters: place all documents you've received back from your playtesters in one same place (e.g. in a folder on your computer or in a physical one). Then, proceed to read the feedback with your team. If you and your teammates have a lot of documents, a good strategy could be to distribute them among yourselves and later on, talk about the highlights of what you've read.
2. Analyze the data: see if there are items that repeat themselves and write them down. This could be a major indicator about something that's not working as you intended to (from bugs to progression of difficulty in your mini-games: if two people perceived the same regarding a part of your StoryQuest, it's very likely a matter that needs to be fixed). Also write down items that do not repeat themselves, but you all deem valuable: is there an item that you would like to include as a possible modification or improvement for your game?
3. Make a list: organize the items according to their importance to the overall StoryQuest. E.g.: if someone (or more than one person even) gave notice about an NPC not behaving as it should, and someone else noticed that the size of an asset on the background is off, what would you set to solve first? Why?
4. Take into account the time that you will want to invest: when creating and applying a hierarchy to the items that you want to modify, think and write down how much time it could take to solve each task. Or even more so: is there an item on the list that can be subdivided into smaller tasks to speed up the process? Make sure that you transform your items into actionable tasks, and that you will have time to at least resolve those tasks that are higher up on the hierarchy list.
5. Assign team members to each task: you and your teammates should divide the work according to your own interest and skills. If there's a task that needs to be subdivided, make sure that the developers that will work on them are communicating in a fluent way, so that their efforts are coordinated, and the major task can be completed in the best way possible.

✅ Done! This ensures that you have read and thought about what you want to modify or implement on your StoryQuest based on player feedback.