Taking Northgale to PLAY! Expo Bergen — Playtesting and Community

By John Hauge on 2026-10-05

At the beginning of October, we packed up our gear and headed to the beautiful city of Bergen to participate in the PLAY! Expo. Our main goal for the weekend was simple but crucial: put an early build of Northgale into the hands of a broad, public audience and see what happens.

Expos like this are incredible arenas for game developers. They offer a rare opportunity to step out of the development bubble and watch real players interact with your world for the very first time.

The "Silent Observer" Approach

Gaming expos are fantastic events for developers to showcase their hard work, connect with the local community, and guide players through their games. Because our main objective for PLAY! Expo was raw playtesting, we opted for a hands-off setup tailored specifically for observation.

We designed our stand as an inviting "free zone" within the cozy game dev lounge we shared with the other developers. The station featured a laptop, a controller, our homemade flag and kite, and some green foliage decorations that fit the vibe of Northgale. Instead of actively introducing the game to passersby, we took a step back and observed the booth from a distance.

Our goal was to gather unfiltered feedback on the player's organic experience: Would the visual style naturally draw people in? How quickly would they grasp the controls and mechanics without any external onboarding or guidance?

To our delight, this observation approach gave us exactly the insights we needed. The visual style of the game proved to be a strong magnet, naturally drawing in a diverse crowd of players who sat down and quickly got lost in the game. It was incredibly rewarding to see that the art direction resonated so well with both younger and older audiences alike, entirely on its own merit.

Proving the Fun Factor (and Hunting Bugs)

One of the most surprising and validating takeaways from the weekend was just how long people spent playing. We brought a stripped-down level meant strictly for testing core movement and abilities, with no real quests or level logic. Despite this, players spent way more time exploring the environment than we ever anticipated. Seeing players actively engage with the core mechanics for extended periods was very rewarding. It effectively validated the "fun factor" of our core systems!

Of course, playtesting is also about finding out what doesn't work.

Watching players try to figure out the game on their own taught us a massive lesson about our onboarding process. While players quickly grasped basic third-person controls like walking, jumping, and steering the camera, they struggled to intuitively understand some of the more situational abilities without a proper tutorial.

And naturally, we found some bugs! We had players managing to break through level boundaries using newly implemented abilities, and we pinpointed a few animation glitches when transitioning between jumping and flying in wind streams. This is exactly why we do these tests, players will always find creative ways to traverse a map that you never thought of!

Connecting with the Bergen Game Dev Scene

While a lot of our time was spent observing our stand, the expo was also a fantastic networking event.

Bergen has a vibrant and growing game development community, and we had the pleasure of greeting and talking with several people from studios in the area. Connecting with fellow developers is always inspiring, and it was a pleasure trying out both their finished games and games they are currently working on.

The Road Ahead

All in all, PLAY! Expo was a fantastic and educational experience. We gathered highly concrete feedback that will directly influence the ongoing development of Northgale, particularly regarding how we teach players to use their abilities.

It also served as a great practice run for us as a studio. Figuring out how to build an inviting stand and run a successful public playtest gives us a lot of confidence for when we eventually take Northgale to even larger expos in the future.

A massive thank you to everyone who sat down to play Northgale, and to the organizers of PLAY! Expo for a great weekend!