[Week 12] Development Blog: LET THE PLAYTESTS BEGIN

Our client works mainly with schools, so she was able to get a lot of schools to come to the ETC and playtest our game. It was sort of like a field trip for them, but for us, it was a decider if our game was fun or not.

On Tuesday, We added more effects, for emotions – like happy and sad faces. It helped us demonstrate the feeling of the town, and even the tiny characters walking in the scene had icons for emotions on their head. We added more UI effects, and also sound effects for spending, or when you get allocated money for your budget, or just the dialogue in general. We decided to do internal playtests on Friday to get feedback from students and faculty.

On Wednesday, we were only progressing with time. New tasks were designated, we were also working on formulas for scaling the difficulty of levels properly. And also formulas for how to convert the budget allocation into happiness meter. We arrived on a formula and decided to stick with it for now, and then tweak later if needed.

On Thursday, we planned further iterations and decided to make a new version of the game for Friday’s internal playtests. Our artists also made some banners to be put in the game to identify different towns.

And eventually, this was a rough flow of our game:

On Friday, we playtested internally and gained some valuable feedback. It is always great to get feedback from design experts like our faculty and fellow students, and we got some feedback which we had previously never thought of, something to think about for future iterations.