As he watched others play his game, “Forklift Fury,” for the first time, Tyler Watts paid close attention to the reactions.

The laughs.

The critiques.

The sometimes-epic fails.

But what Watts was mainly hoping for from the public gameplay at a recent Joybreaks meetup in downtown Orlando was brutal honesty.

“It’s paramount to put your games in front of people,” said Watts, who is one of the leaders of the six-person team to build “Forklift Fury.” “As a developer, your perspective is skewed by your knowledge of the technology and the game design’s intention. You need the average person’s perspective to guide you.”

The game is a physics-based four-player party brawler, in the same vein as “Mario Party” and other popular titles, where you operate a forklift and try to force opponents out of bounds or off the board.

It was the first game created under the banner of a fledgling game studio in Orlando, Surprise Studios.

Feedback is important because it can teach a team to balance honest critique with a real love for the game, said Samantha Cuevas, a 2D artist on the Surprise team.

“You have to learn how to be critiqued,” she said. “Ultimately, there will always be harsh honesty and even just someone bashing on your game in general. What’s important is how you approach critiques.”

At the “Joybreaks” event, friends and supporters took their turns battling one-on-one-on-one-on-one.

The game came from a collaboration between Watts and Jack Murray, who conceived the game’s premise initially.

After finishing a capstone project for school, he was exhausted and wanted to work on something that would reignite his passion.

His goal: “Something dumb, funny and exciting.”

Enter Forklift Fury.

“As developers, we go into these things with our own expectations and opinions on mechanics (or) the optimal game strategies,” Watts said. “But our players were showing us strategies we had never considered, or exposed us to new ideas or improvements to mechanics that we hadn’t thought about.”