During the development of Aces, we knew that doing a lot of playtests was not an option but a necessity. But organize playtests for a game with 10 players is a bit tricky, especially for a little student team.

So in order to collect as many data as possible from all these playtests, I’ve decided to make tools.

The first one is an array, created from an XML generated at the end of a game, which contains details of all the actions performed by players.

So we had access to some classic data, like number of kills/deaths, but also more specific data, like the time players spent capturing points, or being focused by turrets. With all these data, we can know if players are getting the game objectives or just fly through the level looking for enemies to kill.

And in order to to complete our knowledge of the overall game’s state, I’ve created little objects, invisible for players, which create meshes from players trajectories.

We could reimport these meshes into our editor to clearly see where players go, and where they die (spheres are deaths places, blue or red means killed by enemies, black means killed by environment).

But there is more! I’ve also made a little tool, to process trajectories in Heatmaps, to get a visual overview of the game.