STO - Developer Blog @ MMORPG

In the Star Trek Online developer blog at MMORPG executive producer Craig Zinkievich's gives his views on the internal play test process for Star Trek Online.

Each week, the entire Star Trek Online team gets together for an internal play test. It’s an incredibly important part of the development cycle, and I think our fans should know more about how we use our experience to shape the game and make it better. We play together every Tuesday for about an hour. Obviously, certain teams play the game quite a bit more than that, but Tuesdays are a special day where everyone on the team – Art, SW, Deign, Audio, Concept Art, Production, QA, OCR – is required to play our game. We get to really focus on key elements we’re adding to the game, and to sit down and have real discussions about what we’re working on.

We assemble a build of the game late Monday, and on Tuesday afternoon we drop what we’re doing and get into a conference room to go over what we’re testing that week. We go over what the major changes and additions over the last week have been to the game, what content we’re going to play and what is the particular focus during the play session.

We spend about an hour playing, and then everybody gets back into the same room. We spend another 15 or 30 minutes gathering as much feedback from the team as possible. What did we like? What didn’t we like? Most importantly - did we have fun? It’s important to talk about the good stuff in addition to the bad, so we can stress the “likes” in future tests.