User Playtest day at the ETC occurred on Saturday. Despite the nice weather we had had earlier in the week. It rained all day on Friday and by Saturday, it was cold, windy, and all the ground was muddy and slippery. Since we had playtesters that were older, we did not want to risk anyone’s safety, so we decided to recalibrate our game for the top of the parking deck. The top floor of the parking deck was open and a large enough space for people to play in. However, as we discovered while we were calibrating, it was excessively windy up there making the cold air unbearable. After all this, we decided it was better for us to not run our game on Saturday, but rather run it later in the week when it would be warmer and sunnier.
Monday started with a conference call with our clients at Games for Change. We discussed ways to improve our game as well as ways to garner attention at the Games for Change Festival to ensure that we have enough players. After this, we booked our tickets to New York and began planning how our game would run in Washington Square Park and what kind of promotional materials we would need to prepare.
Following the weekend, the weather forecast said that Thursday would be warm and sunny, so we decided to run our next playtest then. We spent the early part of the week preparing for this test. We made some minor changes to the game’s mechanics and prepared a survey for after the test. On Thursday we had around 30 players, including students and faculty, and ran our game twice. Though we did run into some problems with people’s phones not working, overall it ran smoothly. Immediately following, we met with our advisors to discuss the results.
Simultaneously, we were making the final preparations for our Soft Opening/Final playtest, which would be occurring the coming weekend on Carnegie Mellon’s main campus as part of the Carnival festivities. We made promotional posters that we posted all over main campus as well as around the ETC. We also took the results from our playtest on Thursday and implemented changes as quickly as we could to ensure that the Carnival test would be a meaningful learning experience. We spent most of Friday implementing changes and fixing bugs. Friday night, the team went outside and tested the final build before Carnival.
This weekend, we plan to run our game at Carnival and will hopefully receive great insight and feedback. We will then begin preparing for our Faculty Soft presentations, which will be occurring on Monday. Next week is the last week before the festival, so we will be very busy making all the final preparations before the Games for Change festival. We cannot wait to showcase all the hard work we have done this semester!