Gameful Beginners Guide – How to Give Feedback

Below is a guide on how to give feedback about the game of other designers. This guide will help you with some ideas on what to keep in mind while analyzing a game and how you should communicate with the designer.

Whenever you’re analyzing a game, you need to have a few things in mind. Either you’ll question some information that the designer left out or question some of the information that he gave in the description of the game.

One of the important points of the game is it’s goal. Many , especially the ones created by the Gameful community, have a social mind set. You should look out for how the designer accomplishes these objectives. If you see that there’s something which could be improved in order to better accomplish the games’ goal, you should definitely help the designer out.

Game mechanics are one of the ways that designers use to accomplish the goal of their game. Evaluate if there’s a core mechanic helping towards that objective, if the smaller mechanics are complementing it and how big of an impact these mechanics are creating to accomplish that objective.

Some games will contain narrative elements in order to get their point across. Try to evaluate how it helps the game and how it could be improved to make it more interesting.

Games have some sort of challenge or obstacle that players must go through to advance in the game. Look for how the game adapts to players of different skill levels and how the skill of a player can improve over time.

Art style is an important aspect of the game. Many times choosing either 2D or 3D can change the game’s feel entirely. Even within 2D and 3D there are many different art styles which can either fully explore the game’s meaning or completely ruin it.

Listen to the sound of the game to see how immersive is the atmosphere and how it improves the player’s experience.

One aspect of games that can really increase the player’s fun is having pleasurable and unexpected events.

Give constructive feedback. Putting the designer down isn’t going to improve the game in any way. If he didn’t believe that the game is worth anything, he wouldn’t post it for review.

When giving feedback to the designer, try to be as polite as possible. This will ensure the designer that you simply want to help improve the game.

Be objective. Avoid being vague or giving excessive meaningless feedback. Your feedback should be mainly for helping improve the game. If something isn’t broken, it doesn’t need to be fixed.

Compliments are always welcome. Look for the positive aspects of the game and bring them up in the conversation. Not only giving feedback about what lacks in the game is helpful but also giving feedback on what’s working also helps.