Week 15 – Loose Ends

Tackling Toxicity with Play

Week 15 – Loose Ends

This week was mostly about sharpening up any bits of the project that we still felt needed it. To ensure we were leaving the experience in a good place, we ran two tests this week, as opposed to the usual one.

Stress Test

The first test was explicitly a stress test. We determined that getting a premium ngrok subscription should allow us to connect up to 120 people within a minute. This has been an issue for us in playtests past, as with the basic subscription we can only connect around 20 people per minute. We invited as many people as we could get a hold of to the stress test to hopefully push the software as hard as we could. We ended up getting 37 concurrent viewers, more than any previous playtest. We gave them the code and had them all connect as simultaneously as possible. We were happy to see that the connection issues were nowhere to be seen.

Final Playtest

The second test was our final full playtest. Its purpose was simple. As stated above, we just wanted to make sure that there were no glaring or minor faults that we wanted to address before finalizing the project. All in all, the test went smoothly. Some minor display issues with the report cards cropped up but were easily handled. I’ll go over the last few iterations we made below.

Iterations

Research & Development

We got a good amount of feedback that the presentation got stale during periods of large walls of text – ie the research & development portions. To maintain some level of interest in the presentation, we added a video to replace pure text-reading. The video featured a new character in the experience – our R&D Lead, Stef!

We are happy with how this turned out, injecting a bit of fun and further building the fiction of our performance.

Report Cards

We iterated on the appearance of the report cards. Originally they were somewhat dry and simply delivered information. After some fine-tuning, the communal report cards have pretty graphs and visual flourishes. These, along with the personalized report cards on each phone, went over well on our final playtest survey.

Lottery Results Delay

The final iteration this week, other than the customary weekly bug fixes, is adding a delay to the lottery results. That is to say, originally as soon as the Wheel stopped spinning we would send the results out to everyone’s phones. However, Twitch streaming has an inherent delay. This meant that phones were receiving the results “before” the wheel stopped spinning from their perspective. This was fixed by adding a very simple ~6 second delay on sending the results.