One of the things I used to do as we were coming into the home stretch on releasing a new RTS game was play test the levels.

It was fun and hard at the same time. I had to put myself in the mindset of pretending to see the level for the first time ever, and try to react as a new player would react to events in the world.

The hard part was trying to take notes and feedback during each play session. Nothing like having to stop ever 2 -3 mins to take notes as a way to ruin your game experience.

Play testing C&C: Generals, I had the idea that if we added code to track the game activities I performed, we could create simple graphs with the information and I wouldn’t have to write any more notes!

Worked like a charm. I could simply play a level and then use the graphs to tune each level based on the graphs.

Some simple patterns emerged. If the graphs showed the simply huge spikes in a repeated pattern of “collect money”, “build lots of tanks”, “attack enemy”, then I knew I was making unsuccessful attempt to crack a base defense or take down an enemy force. From experience, I knew that doing that pattern 2 or 3 times was ok, but when it got to be 4, 5, and 6 attempts, the game would start to get boring so we would use the graphs to go back and tune the level.

That experience taught me the power of using real statistics to help tune game play, rather than simply rely on a sense of “feel”. It’s also one of the reason I enjoy working on Social Games. We can use real stats and numbers to tune and improve the game experience for our players each day if necessary. There’s a sense of real freedom doing things this way. If you’re making a game and haven’t tried it yet, I strongly suggest it.