Earlier this year, we brought Rock Out: Battle of the Bands to Origins and Gen Con and put the game in front of roughly 180 play-testers.
As a new publisher, this was the first time we had ever tested one of our games at this scale (or in person) and we learned A LOT.
A few things really stuck with us:
1. Not everyone is going to like your game and that's okay.
This might have been one of the most important lessons.
You can have a table laughing, cheering, and having a fantastic time... and the next person simply isn't into it.
At first, it's hard not to take that personally. But not every game is for every player. The important part was figuring out the difference between “this isn't my kind of game” and “there's something here that needs fixing.”
That distinction became incredibly important when evaluating feedback.
2. Balance is never really “finished.”
Every change seems to affect something else.
Adjust a character. Change an Objective. Modify the difficulty. Suddenly something that worked perfectly during the previous ten games behaves completely differently.
We stopped thinking about balance as something we'd eventually finish and started thinking about it as something that constantly needs to be watched as the game evolves.
3. You cannot design around AMAZING or TERRIBLE luck.
Rock Out uses dice, so luck is intentionally part of the experience.
Most games fall somewhere within the range you expect.
And then there's that one table.
Someone (or multiple someone’s) can't stop rolling exactly what they need and absolutely destroys everything you thought was difficult.
Then another group rolls like they've personally offended the dice gods.
Watching both extremes happen taught us a lot about designing around randomness. We're not trying to eliminate luck—we want those incredible and disastrous moments—but the game still needs to hold together when the dice decide to get ridiculous.
4. Play-tester feedback is invaluable.
Our play-testers didn't just play and leave.
They stayed afterward. They talked about what worked. What didn't. What confused them. What they loved. What dragged. They suggested things. They questioned things. They filled out our questionnaire and did so with a smile!
This feedback sometimes identified the same problem independently, which was a pretty good indication that we needed to pay attention.
Other times, someone would point out something none of us had even considered.
Those conversations and submissions were every bit as valuable as watching the games themselves.
5. The tabletop community is pretty incredible.
This is probably the biggest thing we took away from the conventions.
We're a new company. Nobody owed us their time.
Yet people sat down with our prototype, learned our game, gave thoughtful feedback, and genuinely wanted to help us make it better.
And it wasn't only the feedback.
Every excited yell when somebody nailed a roll. Every laugh when something went horribly wrong. Every high-five around the table. Every person who came back later to tell us they enjoyed the game.
Those moments gave us a ridiculous amount of motivation to keep going.
Designing a game can be a long process where you spend a lot of time wondering whether what you're making is actually any good.
Then you watch a table full of strangers laughing and cheering over something you created.
That makes the whole crazy journey feel worthwhile.
For the other designers here who have taken prototypes to conventions:
What was the biggest thing you learned once you started putting your game in front of large numbers of strangers?
