From joystiq.com: If you played Spry Fox’s Free-Range Dragons at PAX Prime earlier this month, you may have a vastly different impression of the game than players who returned to the team’s booth during the show’s final hours.
This isn’t just a matter of taste, either. Spry Fox actively updated its PAX Prime demo of Free-Range Dragons throughout the expo weekend, making sweeping changes in response to player behavior and feedback. The experiment was a valuable learning experience for Spry Fox, and produced results that will likely inform the project’s future direction.
Spry Fox takes player feedback very seriously. Days before PAX Prime, the studio released a major update for its roguelike Road Not Taken, introducing a new difficulty mode in response to players who felt that the initial release was too challenging.
Spry Fox’s unique studio setup facilitated quick updates at PAX. During the show, Spry Fox developers demoed the current prototype version of Free-Range Dragons and responded to player questions. Afterward, team members relayed feedback to UK-based programmer Andrew Fray, who then produced a new build of the game for the next expo day while his compatriots in Seattle slept.
“PAX is an awesome place to get real-time, high-value feedback on a game,” Spry Fox CEO David Edery said. “We use services like usertesting.com to playtest our games but the people who use those services tend to behave ‘abnormally.’ (For example, the average tester at usertesting.com carefully and deliberately reads all the text that appears in a game — most people do the exact opposite and don’t read anything, or pay little attention to the few things they do read.)”
Read more at joystiq.com
