Valve's "Secret Weapon"

I discovered the importance of playtesting while working on my very own game. You can follow my development journey by watching the series "Developing" - youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc38fcMFcV_uH3OK4sTa4bf…

Imagine the anxiety when gabe stopped the presentation, then the whiplash when they all got jobs at valve, an absolute dream

Kind of funny how Portal, a game all about testing and test chambers, would never have been as succesful as it was without its extreme amounts of player testing.

This type of development requires a very special style of leadership that doesn't punish their employees when they get negative feedback. If tests are done every week, and every week you hear what doesn't work with your current approach, your boss needs to be fully behind you to consider it a chance for improvement and not a "trick" to point out all of your mistakes.

My brother actually found out “players never look up” the hard way - as a player. There’s a temple in Twilight Princess where one of the last puzzles is simply looking up - super easy in hindsight, but it took him over an hour to solve it.

Playtesting is a Compass, not a Map. It is best used to tell if you are going in the right direction, not what that direction is.

my new headcanon is that the "science" done in portal is just in-universe playtesting

This “antagonist” concept is exactly why a lot of portal-inspired first person puzzle games fall flat and feel lifeless.

I have huge respect for the level designers of Portal

One of the best playtesting stories out there is when Shigeru Miyamoto's son first picked up and played Super Mario 64. Miyamoto was a little concerned with the fact that he wasn't showing interest in going into the paintings of Peach's Castle to go after the power stars, but spent over half an hour just running around and jumping and trying to run up and slide down slopes, walls, and attempt wall kick jumps outside Peach's Castle.
It ironically was a good sign, because as his son and so many other children pointed out in the post-playtest interviews for Super Mario 64, they LOVED how well Mario controlled. Miyamoto and his team spending a year focusing on Mario's controls, statistics, and animations really paid off if the simple act of running and jumping around in a 3D game could be fun.

These Valve guys are pretty good, maybe they should make some more games

For most of the first year of Portal's development, the "actual game" was the tutorial. The final game's sequence of test chambers were all initially concepted as being the tutorial section for a much larger game that they scaled back on significantly.

14:03 This is especially shown in the climax of Portal 2.






Realistically, "shoot the moon" is the easiest puzzle solution of all time. It's basically the only interactive option on the screen. But seeing everything fall apart around you, tension at the highest point, and calling back to the source of portal surfaces; that made the climax incredibly satisfying without being hard.

Pretty fitting that the developers of Portal also loves testing ;)

Seems like Valve realized this too since they love using Portal to showcase their new tech like VR and the Steam Deck.

It's basically their mascot nowadays

When Valve was busy developing CS2 which is coming out soon, they invited bunch of community figures and ex-pros to playtest it at Valve HQ. These people later said that there were dozens of Valve employees watching them play live in the same room. And all the time they were asked feedback and sometimes changes based on that were implemented the same day. This video gave me some background to that story.

Valve’s developer commentary is fascinating. Hearing about how they changed the puzzles to make it so players didn’t get stuck but also not easy enough for it to be a cake-walk (pun not intended) is really cool and gives a lot of insight into what it’s like to develop a game.

If only they still developed games.

Testing early is also really important because people are much more willing to criticise something that doesn't look like it's received a ton of love and if it looks like it would be easy to make changes to it at its current stage. This doesn't only work with games mind you, it also works with websites, apps, and pretty much anything you can think of. In university I learned about wireframe designs in web design, where everything looks so barebones you sometimes are even just giving people things written on paper, it really helps the iteration process.

This game has the most adorable sentry guns ever made.
It's actually kinda mad when that sentence makes people go: yes, yes indeed. You're absolutely right.

Who on earth decided to make sentry guns of all things, cute and lovable? And make you feel sorry when taking them out?
I fear Gabe adds something fishy to the office coffee maker every morning 😆

The best (and occasionally the most soul crushing) thing you can do after submitting your game to a jam is checking out streamers who are playing games from it. You can usually submit your game to their playlist and discover all the things that could go wrong, in realtime!

I've been watching your videos for years and this might be your best work imo. You don't just "still have it", you have improved like crazy. Genuenly thank you for making videos like this.