CLIENT: Rtveli Hollow Games🇬🇪Georgia

Tsqaro - Playtest and Pitch Console for a Standalone VR Puzzle Demo

VR Playtest Console for a Tbilisi Indie Studio

Designed and built a clickable studio console for a seven-person Tbilisi studio's standalone VR puzzle demo: builds on release channels with a QA checklist, playtest sessions with a live run sheet and comfort stops, and comfort results by setting that answer a publisher's first question with evidence.

Scope of Work
Product design, UI build and clickable demo
Industry
Gaming / VR Game Prototype
SaaS
Compliance & Certifications
Georgian Personal Data Protection LawGDPRWCAG 2.2 AAW3C XR Accessibility User RequirementsGame Accessibility GuidelinesMeta Horizon technical requirements

Most of our work is under NDA. Per agreement, we can share the work but not the company details - all names and identifying information shown here have been changed.

Impact

5 Screens
Clickable end to end

Dashboard, sessions calendar and list, the live session run sheet, build detail with 5 tabs and comfort results. The date range, filters, seat actions and checklist results all change what you see.

7 of 10
Comfort stop on the run sheet

An in-headset comfort check every 10 minutes of play. A score of 7 or above turns the seat red and shows the break protocol: remove the headset, seat the tester, offer water, do not resume within 10 minutes.

12 QA Checks
On every build

72 fps on target devices, boundary handling, pause on headset removal, comfort vignette, seated reach, subtitles and the health and safety screen. Items not checked against Meta's documentation in 90 days show as review due.

20 Sessions
Realistic demo data

4 playtest rounds, 30 playtesters, 10 builds including processing, failed and known-bad ones, 10 bugs, 7 crash groups and 109 comfort survey respondents.

The Problem

Rtveli Hollow had a promising vertical slice and no way to prove it. Builds were side-loaded from a designer's laptop, nobody could say which build a tester had played, and playtest notes lived in a shared document, a phone camera roll and three people's heads. Publishers asked about motion sickness first, and the studio could only say some people felt a bit off. Two festival deadlines were missed, and the playtest sign-up form asked for health questions with no consent text or retention rule.

Our Solution

Tsqaro gives the studio one place to ship a build to a release channel, run playtests against a known build, watch each seat's comfort live, turn crashes and tester reports into bugs, and hand a publisher evidence: completion rates, comfort scores by locomotion setting and a clean press kit.

The Challenge: Proving a VR Demo Is Comfortable

The demo is a 35 minute puzzle game for Meta Quest headsets, with a tutorial and four levels, built to win a publisher deal or a festival slot. Getting there means testing it on real people, and every test produces data about their bodies.

Comfort Is the First Question

Publishers want to know who feels sick and why. The answer depends on the settings each player chose (teleport or smooth movement, snap or smooth turning, vignette strength, seated or standing), so scores mean nothing unless they are tied to the settings in force at the time.

Symptom Answers Are Health Data

Motion sickness answers can reveal information about a person's health, which Georgian law treats as a special category with stricter conditions. They need their own consent that a tester can refuse and still play, and must never be shown one person at a time.

Movement Data Can Identify People

Head and hand tracking is distinctive enough to help identify a person. Telemetry has to be linked to a pseudonymous id rather than a name, sampled at a low rate and shown only as aggregates, with no eye or face tracking at all.

Builds Nobody Could Trace

Without release channels and a checklist, the team could not say which build a tester or publisher had, whether it held 72 fps on a Quest 2, or whether it paused when the headset came off, checks that map to Meta's published requirements.

Our Approach: From Playtest Rules to a Clickable Console

01

Spec and Rules Research

Mapped 12 roles from studio director to facilitator, playtester and the player in the headset, 41 screens across the studio console, public web pages and the headset itself, and the data model for builds, release channels, sessions, seats, consents, telemetry, comfort checks, bugs, pitches and data requests. Wrote down the rules the design follows: the Law of Georgia on Personal Data Protection, GDPR for EU waitlist sign-ups, Meta's platform requirements, VR comfort practice, the W3C XR Accessibility User Requirements, the Game Accessibility Guidelines and WCAG 2.2 AA.

02

Clickable Demo on a Production UI Kit

Built 5 key screens of the studio console on a production dashboard kit: the dashboard with completion, comfort, crash-free and waitlist KPIs, the sessions calendar and list with a schedule session sheet, the run sheet for a live session with pre-flight checks, pairing, comfort alerts and observations, build detail with QA checklist, performance, crashes and compare tabs, and comfort results with filters and sample-size suppression. All actions run on local state.

03

What a Production Build Adds

The headset build itself in Unity with OpenXR and the Meta XR SDK, release channels through the Meta Horizon developer platform, CI builds, Sentry or Backtrace crash reporting, a telemetry store such as ClickHouse on AWS in Frankfurt, Jira or Linear sync, Postmark and Mailchimp or Brevo email, Twilio reminders and Google Calendar invites. Staff auth with contact access by role, an append-only audit log, and the remaining screens: heatmaps, progression, bugs, launch, privacy, settings, the public pages and the in-headset flow.

Why It Works: Evidence Without Exposing Testers

Comfort Split by Setting

Every comfort score is read against the settings in force when it was given. The dashboard and comfort results compare teleport with smooth movement and snap with smooth turning, with sample sizes, so the team can propose defaults and a studio director approves them.

Small Samples Stay Hidden

Comfort figures from fewer than 10 respondents are hidden and no individual answers are shown. Filter to testers aged 45 and over and the numbers disappear rather than pointing at a handful of people.

The Run Sheet Protects the Tester

Each seat shows its consents as ticks, a six-step pre-flight checklist including age 18 or over and a cleaned headset, and a live discomfort dot. Ending a seat early asks for a reason, and testers who stop still get their 50.00 GEL voucher.

Every Build Is Accounted For

Each build shows the release channels it has been on, its QA checklist against platform requirements, frame rate per device and level against the 72 fps target, crash groups linked to bugs, and a compare view. A known-bad build is blocked from new sessions.

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