Production sprint II & playtesting

Mon 2:00 · Brief Watching people play

This is the last sprint before the final crit. Everything today is about closing the gap between the game in your head and the game other people actually experience.

Why silent observation beats asking

The single most valuable thing you'll do today is shut up and watch. When a tester gets stuck, your instinct is to explain — don't. The confusion is the data. If you have to stand over someone's shoulder explaining the controls, that's a UX bug, not a testing accident. You won't be there when a stranger downloads it from itch.io, so learn what breaks when you're silent.

Feedback is data, not orders

Every tester will tell you what to change. Most of them are right about the problem and wrong about the fix — "add a tutorial" usually means "I was confused here," which you might solve with a clearer first room instead. Your job is to hear the symptom, diagnose the cause, and decide the fix. Feedback triage is where taste and judgment show; it's the skill this whole phase is training.

The ship checklist starts now

A packaged standalone build is how the world plays your work — a zipped download they unzip and run. But packaging has real constraints: shipping vs. development configuration, missing content references, and a startup that must not crash on a cold machine. We package early and publish a draft today so that any build problem surfaces this week, not during finals when there's no time to fix it.

Mon 2:45 · Guided lab Playtest, triage, and publish a draft

We run real playtests on each other, then take one clean build all the way to a live itch.io draft.

1. Set up the playtest

   Pair up and hand your build to a classmate. Write down one concrete task for them to attempt — "reach the second area," "beat the first encounter." Have a one-page survey ready: three questions max, answerable in a minute. Structure keeps the test comparable across testers.

2. Observe in silence

   Watch your tester attempt the task without helping or narrating. Note exactly where they hesitate, misread a control, or do something you never intended. Timestamp the moments they get stuck. Resist every urge to explain — silence is the whole method.

3. Run the survey and debrief

   After the task, have them fill the survey, then ask two open questions: "what was confusing?" and "what did you want to do that you couldn't?" Capture their words, not your paraphrase. Then swap and test theirs.

4. Triage into three buckets

   Sort every note into must-fix (blocks or badly confuses players), nice-to-have (improves it but survivable), and ignore (one person's taste, or out of scope). Be ruthless — you have one week, and a shipped B is worth more than an unfinished A.

5. Package a clean standalone build

   Platforms → Windows → Package Project (Shipping or Development), and package to an empty output folder. Watch the Output Log for cook errors or missing content references. A clean package with no errors is the baseline; fix anything red before you go further.

6. Verify it runs standalone

   Run the packaged .exe from the output folder on a machine that isn't your editor, and confirm it launches past the splash, runs at a reasonable frame rate, and accepts input. If it crashes on startup or hangs, that's a cook or content-reference problem to fix now — not on finals day.

7. Zip it and publish to itch.io as a draft

   Zip the packaged build folder, create a new project on itch.io, set the kind to Downloadable, upload the zip, and tag the platform Windows. Leave visibility on Draft. Open the project page and confirm the download is listed.

8. Confirm the draft downloads and runs

   Download your own itch.io draft to a clean folder as if you were a stranger, unzip, and run the .exe. It should launch, play, and be finishable. If it works here, it works for your finals guests — that's the point of publishing early.

Wed 2:00 · Agent lab From notes to a scoped plan

You have a pile of raw playtest notes. Turn them into a plan you can actually execute in the one week you have left.

Wed 3:10 · Crit / share Playtest debrief & final ship checklist

We debrief the playtests as a group: each person names the one thing they watched a tester struggle with that they hadn't expected, and the one fix they're committing to before the final. Then we walk the final ship checklist together — build packages clean, itch.io draft downloads and is finishable, trailer shots in hand, process documentation started, AILOG current. You leave today knowing exactly what stands between your build and the showcase, with one week to close it.

Homework — due before Week 15

Resources

• itch.io creator docs — how to upload and configure a downloadable build.
• Unreal packaging docs — build configurations, cooking content, and platform settings.
• Unreal optimization — profiling and performance for your packaged build.
• Unreal Engine docs — general polish and quality guidance for your final pass.