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u/RiftedSkies

r/VRGaming r/TheRiftedSkies r/Quest3 r/OculusQuest r/gamedev r/virtualreality r/oculus r/MetaQuestVR
β–² 26 r/virtualreality

We are coming to Steam Next Fest with our parkour game - The Rifted Skies!

Hello everyone! We are the developers behind The Rifted Skies - fast paced, parkour game.

We will be participating in the Steam Next Fest, which starts on October 19th, but you won't have to wait until the Next Fest starts. We heard from our community that they would need more time. :P

We are opening the gates on October 12th for everyone on Steam! πŸ₯³

General Info

  • You will be able play The Rifted Skies Demo between October 12-26th.
  • The Demo will be live on Steam only.
  • Limited time demo, jump in while you can!

πŸ”—Read more here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/4857730/view/704406925525123158

πŸ”—Demo Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5076390/The_Rifted_Skies_Demo/

Thanks for trying our game! <3

u/RiftedSkies β€” 7 days ago
β–² 1 r/TheRiftedSkies

Looks quite easy, right?

POV: You found an "beginner" parkour guide online.

The guide in question:

u/RiftedSkies β€” 2 months ago
β–² 0 r/gamedev

How many people do you actually need for a useful playtest? We tested with 40.

Hello fellow devs, we’re the team behind the VR parkour game The Rifted Skies, and we wanted to share some insight on our recent playtest.

Yeah, it's a VR game unlike what many other developers do here but still - perhaps it will be helpful for some of you! :')

We recently had around;

  • 60 people request access,
  • 40 actually played
  • Roughly half of those players leave us feedback.

So is 40 enough?

Honestly, we don't know. Perhaps 100 more players would discover 100 more bugs lol.

However, we believe that the effectiveness of a playtest depends not on how many people play, but on how many we, as the team, can listen to and process.

For this playtest, 40 players was plenty because the feedback was unusually detailed.

One player sent us over 1,800 words. Another came back to Discord daily with new impressions and ideas. Overall, we had actual conversations with testers rather than just collecting form responses.

This brings us to the first recommendation we have for other developers:

Give up on Google Forms

Our previous playtests used Google Forms, and we got significantly less feedback.

This time, we just posted a message in Discord explaining what we'd like to know. It turned out we didn't need to make players fill out a questionnaire to get our answers. Moving the feedback to Discord probably felt less formal, and whatever the reason, it worked much better for us.

Most importantly, it let us talk to people about their feedback instead of just collecting it.

Obviously, this is one small sample and might not work for every community, but if you're getting very little feedback from your playtests, it might be worth trying.

What did 40 players actually help us find?

There were things that showed up repeatedly:

  • We already got some features in development for the future but we realized, we have to get them ready on launch due to feedback.
  • Since our game is a parkour game, you have to keep moving. If you stop, a black smoke called Rift will follow you and damage you when it catches up to you. We couldn't decide how to show the player the damage until one tester suggested something incredibly simple: "Just add a vignette when the player enters the zone." Done, thanks player!
  • Loot was confusing. Players weren't sure how to collect. The funniest part? We had one person on the team who kept pointing this out for ages, but we kept postponing it because there was always something more important to work on. Well, not anymore.

You don't need 40 people to independently discover every possible solution. Sometimes just one person is enough.

So how many testers are enough?

We still don’t know.

A larger playtest will obviously give more data, but it will also take way more time to analyze it.

So if you're wondering whether your playtest is β€œtoo small”, we'd say: focus less on the number and more on whether you can actually listen to the people you have.

That's also why we wanted to close the loop with our own community. We asked them to spend their time helping us improve the game, so we think they deserve to know what we actually heard and what we're going to do about it.

We wrote up the full list of things our testers taught us, including some of the funny and embarrassing findings, on our Steam post!

Thanks for reading! :')

If you're curious about our game, here is the link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4857730/The_Rifted_Skies/

u/RiftedSkies β€” 2 months ago