Hello itchers!

I couldn't find a similar topic but I'm new here, so apologies if it comes as a duplicate...

Anyway, as I finally managed to beat my own game this week as in "finishing it fair and square", I wondered if it's generally the case that game developers really manage to go all the way in their own game. Of course it depends on the kind of game, but generally ones that have official endings or challenges to unlock. In my case, as you may read, it took a little while and I'm definitely not finished with the trophies I created, especially the likes of "complete 20, 30, 40 levels in 1 life only"...

What about you? Are you so into your game that you could crush it blindfolded after hours of playtest? Or are you admitting that you struggled to reach the end in a normal player setting? Is it a sign that it's too hard or does it show depth and a longer shelf-life?

Very curious to know how it goes for you ;-)

JerkyHips

My games can be quite hard (I like a challenge, makes the reward sweeter). Some of my games I have barely beaten, and one (brick-breaker) I havent't beaten, but I was on the last level with one more brick to go when I died, so i know it's possible.

I test my game a lot along with playing it, I check if there's error and glitches in it. I mean if it's a full game, I'd prob not going to survive for a minute since it's a horror game. When it's released, I'll test the full game!

My game involves puzzle-solving, exploration and so on, and it took me over five hours to finish it without my notes the first time I played it. 😅

I play test my games to ensure they're beatable. Thrack is not excluded from this process 

Very interesting topic that triggers both my gamer and dev sides (not an expert dev by any means tho).
My friends know that when I'm facing a particularly bull*hit challenge in a hard game, or even ones that are not even supposed to be hard, I'd usually (very maturely and pretentiously) go "Plaese playtest your game before selling it to me." or "I wanna see the game designer do this in no damage!".

Most of the times this is obviously a a skill issue from my part lol but sometimes we all got vindicated by the dreaded "balance patches" that somehow mean that you didn't beat the game and stuff like that. A skilled driver can and *will* be able to drive a clunky old broken car home safely, but that doesn't change the fact that car *is* broken and needs to be fixed (Promised Consort Radahn has entered the chat).

So basically yes, obvious bug-checking aside, when it comes to difficulty and all that comes with it I absolutely playtest the s*it out of my own game and some months ago I had friends playtesting a platformer I published last week. As a side note: watching  your friends playtest your game can be hilarious and a fantastic learning experience, especially if they're different kind of gamers, like some are more used to old-school platformers (like mine), while others were surprisingly struggling with basic stuff, but that's another story. Back to me, while my game was never supposed to be particularly difficult, it does have some more challenging gauntlets and I made sure I could beat those (like everything else) without taking any damage, over and over, sometimes doing mistakes on purpose to see if there's even room for small mistakes (which there should be in my opinion).

The "problem" with playtesting  your own game and beating it is that... well, you made the game, you basically mastered it before it even started existing, you know everything that's coming for you, you know the hitboxes, what's going on behind the scenes, the pixel perfect tricks (that a player *can* learn but not as fast as you because YOU made it). Obviously that's not true for every genre I'm sure (I'm limiting myself to platformers because that's the kind of game I made), like OK I developed a roguelike but randomness still gonna be random, so to speak, in that case the playtesting part goes beyond "act and react" and reaches different layers of depths (which is why I don't make roguelikes: I'm dumb -I do play them tho).

Short answer: YES, despite the unfairness of me knowing everything the game is gonna throw at me (because I made it), I absolutely playtest my own games, even doing no damage runs, because  I want to make sure everything is fair.

I think I'm falling in the same category as most people, "I can beat my own game but completely mastering it is very hard"

...but as a game designer I also need to point some issues on just saying "my game is too hard" and using that as an excuse for not playtesting your game:

- if you cannot beat your game, you (often but not always) cannot ensure it is possible

- if the developer of the game, even after weeks, months or maybe years of playing, cannot beat it's own game, let's be realistic what are the odds of a player beating it?

Also, for your game to have a group of people willing to try to beat these challenges, you need a fun game, with a good difficulty progression, and some kind of incentive for the players to grind a top playing field (the latter usually comes when you have a game with good community support). Otherwise players will lowkey not care with the hardest challenges of your game lol

If you're still reading this, you might be thinking about my games. Just look at some examples of my games:

- in my game "paradox space", we have over 70 levels (with almost 30 to come), divided in difficulty tiers from 1-, 1, 1+ to 6+, and a big list that ranks the difficulty of all the levels in the main game, in it's community edition and in it's fanmades. It usually takes me over a day to beat a level around the hardest difficulty tiers with checkpoints, and it also usually takes me days to beat some levels around 1+ difficulty without checkpoints, so it would probably take months or years to beat the hardest levels perfectly (or for players to even get to know how to beat these levels with checkpoints at first place)

- in my game "eternal fall", an endless runner where you just fall and dodge obstacles, my record is ~12000 points, but to unlock a secret world (designed to be borderline impossible and requiring a strong community of people with insane levels of dedication), you need to get 50000 points. And after some point thresholds that cause the game to get harder, the last threshold is at 1000000 points, that causes the game to pretty much spawn an obstacle per frame

- in my game "collapse", you have several levels to beat, and unlike most of my other games, each level is usually just around 10 seconds long, but a set of slightly secret levels, the "expert challenges", require extreme player control, very tight inputs and limited vision. I just managed to beat a few levels of this set of levels, but several of these levels are unverified (with one being just theoretically possible)

So yes, I think I am the king of "brutally hard games"...

my games are all with endless gameplay so i try to make them as challenging as i can by balancing it as well as i can .. there is no beating the games other then your own score

I made sure to play every level of my physics peggle like game called Smuto. Some of the levels had me retrying a bunch, but after a few rounds of cursing it is beatable.

Generally only release my games if I enjoy playing then, and typically I can beat my own games, but there nuances:  

• Obviously in my detective game I know what happened and the murderers. If play it it isn't objective.    
• I also have endless games. I consider them beaten when I unlocked every item albeit of course I can still continue playing.
• Then there are games that have a clear end. I always manage to build "Bill-Burton-Road", but it doesn't feel easy. I sometimes need to go back and try another way. Since the map is randomly generated I don't have the advantage of knowing what lies ahead already.
• And there is my Ball track builder. The rounds  are very short. I win more rounds than I loose, but it isn't easy. Again since start and end are random, it is different every time. The geometry is so obvious that it isn't an advantage for me that I made it.

I always test my games at lot, really A LOT ! to find bugs, difficulty issues, typos, inconsistencies. I can perform quick runs (as I like to call runs that would be a good base for a speed run) of my games.

I don't have a choice.  If I cannot beat my game, or at least play it sufficiently far enough, how can I expect others to?  Otherwise, I would end up with a long list of bug reports.

AS, also known as Alone Studios, is a game created by my team. We worked hard to make what once seemed impossible a reality. The game features cutscenes, an Custom Night mode, and behind-the-scenes content. 

We hope you’re interested and enjoy what we’ve created!

Alone Studio by OfficialCYS