4 doughnuts and a playtest

Playtested the game at Sandbox gym this week. Brought one beautiful piece of promo material and four doughnuts, which turns out to be a decent price of entry. Left with a list of assumptions I get to throw out.

You cannot overstate how important user testing is. You come to your own user journey with a pile of preconceived notions about what players will do — and then someone else touches the UI and it's suddenly the wild wild west.

I'll be honest: user testing is hard for me. I'm not a people person, and the small-talk intros are rough. This one ended up informal and informative, which is about the best outcome I could have asked for.

Main lesson: people don't read. I know. I keep re-learning it. Most of the engineering processes I've shipped over my career were well documented — guess how well they were read? On the game-dev side, I think I need to do real research on how people actually learn tactical UIs now. Do they just expect to /claude tell me how to do this? Did we lose the art of discovering UI?

Second lesson: the things I worried about weren't the hard things. Everyone got through onboarding. Some by performing tasks methodically, some by smashing buttons until something happened. Both paths worked. Both are data.

I only tested the tutorial fight this round — haven't put crafting in front of anyone yet. That's next Wednesday's problem. 8)