Week 11 is about more production and playtest.
To be able to have the faculty playtest session as soon as possible, we pushed ourselves to finish the production quicker and iterate as much as we can.
We made the puzzle for scene 3 and had a playtest on Wednesday. It was in general good, but not very intuitive. Also, it might be too difficult to solve, so people spent too much time on puzzle solving. So after that, we made changes to make it easier and more intuitive.
Narrative wise, we finished Scene 4, which is the feedback of Scene 3, so the players will get to know how their work takes effect in the story, which is a very important connecting point in our structure. We also made new character sheets and rewrote their relationship with the target cities, so every player will be more connected to the story when they get to know the suspicious cities.
The App is still under development, we have finished most of the modeling and some interactions finished. Some details of its design is yet complete and solid, so our programmers are more focusing on implementation of network, to let the facilitator phone be able to control the props.
On Saturday the 7th, we had our playtest day with 3 groups of people tested our experience in three 40 minutes time slots. We let different groups test different combination of scenes, in order to see how well our Narrative design and Puzzle design blend.
The result of the three sessions was different from each other, but they all shared some problems. The biggest problem is that players couldn’t get onboard fast when we were trying to let them.
We learned a lot from the playtest day. It’s not only about how should we arrange our time better, it is also a lesson to what to expect in a session with shorter time than the whole session.
