What Gamescom players thought of our Hex Minesweeper
At Gamescom we spent a big part of our days just watching people play our web games. We already wrote about the overall impressions from the event in our previous post, so here I want to go into one thing in more detail: how players reacted to our Hex Minesweeper and how we found the right people to test it with in the first place.
Because that is actually the first problem at an event like Gamescom. It is huge, hundreds of thousands of people come there over a few days and all of them are gamers. But being a gamer means being a gamer of your own genre. Someone who plays shooters every evening will not necessarily tell us anything useful about a logic puzzle. So how do you find your own audience in a crowd like that?
Two questions
What we did was quite simple. The first contact usually happened by itself, because a lot of people came to us and asked “hey, what are you doing here, are you a company?“. Sometimes I approached bigger groups myself and said that we are a small indie game development studio. And after that I always asked the same two questions.
The first one: do you like puzzle games and would you like to playtest some of ours? And then, only if they said yes, the second one: do you know and like the Minesweeper game?
Some people answered that classic Minesweeper is boring for them. That is a completely fair answer, and for those people I suggested to try Catch’n’Merge or Clean! instead, which was received quite nicely.
But when someone said “yes, I know it and I like it”, then I knew this is exactly the person to test Hex Minesweeper and Hex Sense with. And there were surprisingly many of them. A lot of people know classic Minesweeper today, know the rules and were very curious to try a hexagonal minesweeper.
I did not explain the rules on purpose
Since they told me themselves that they know the rules, I decided to say nothing and just give them the game. I thought that they could figure out on their own what to press and how to win.
And most of them did it on the first try. They found out how to open a tile and how to mark a tile as a hazard with a right click, they saw how many hazards are hidden on the field and understood the numbers instantly. For most players minesweeper is still just minesweeper, no matter which shape the tiles have.
The only friction that I noted was the small chain icon on the tile. In case you don’t know, it means that the hazards around that tile are located next to each other, in adjacent tiles. We added this icon so that every puzzle can be solved without guessing.
At the beginning more than half of the players did not understand what it meant. They simply ignored it and kept playing. And then several times they came to a moment where you really do have to guess, because the numbers alone were sometimes not enough to say which tile is safe and which one is a hazard.
So they guessed and sometimes they guessed wrong and lost the level. It was very tempting to give them a hint, but I kept quiet and just watched. And most of them got there by themselves: “okay, somehow I always have to guess when this tile with the chain is nearby”. Then they clicked on it, understood what it meant and after that they were completely fine.
A few players kept ignoring the chain until the very end and then I explained it to them. So this is the one thing we clearly have to make more obvious inside the game, because a player should not need a person standing next to them to learn it.
Overall I was really surprised how well this playtesting went and how warm the reception was. People liked Hex Minesweeper much more than we expected, and several of them asked where they can play it later at home. Now I keep thinking, maybe we should also make a triangle minesweeper one day. We can’t really control the ideas that come to mind.
What do you think? Maybe you would like to playtest one of our new games? Tell us in our Discord server.
Written by
Ana