Week 11 has been a pretty dramatic week for Team Joule. To start the week off, on Monday we met with advisors to talk more about what has been happening with the team and the game itself, get more feedback that had come in over the week from halves, and to talk about our playtest that took place on Wednesday at Elizabeth Forward. The team continued on its projected path that we all had set into place at the end of week 10 and began our next scrum cycle.
On Tuesday was the final day that we would have access to Andrew, before he would head off to LA for the 2016 TEA conference. We primarily used this time to define what exactly we would do while he was away, and what we need form him before he would be leaving for the week. One discussion that came up was around the creation of a character that would help to convey the events that would be happening in the game as the students played every week, as well as guide the new players through tutorial that the game will have.
After Andrew had left, the three of us continued to work on a new build of the game for the ETC playtest day at the end of the week, that would allow us to verify changes that we were making from the data we generated at EF last week. Over Wednesday and Thursday most changes to the game were added, such as simple bug fixes, along with feature implementation such as comparisons and a change in hierarchy of data in the main monitor, as well as a few other changes. Event UI was also finished, but seemed to be out of scope to get into the new build for Saturday morning.
Friday we had a short visit from a representative of Blue Cadet, which he was able to play through the first year of our new build of the game. We used the day to make small changes to the build, as well as set up the computers, monitors, and camera in preparation for the early morning on Saturday.
Playtest day went very well on Saturday. We had 6 groups come through and play the new build of the game. The group sizes ranged from groups of 2 to groups of 4. We also go to test with an interesting range of age groups, ranging from 3rd and 4th graders to 8th graders. We also had a team of two players get their carbon footprint down to only 5 tons of coal a year, which was impressive to the three of us, as well we had 2 new high scores with over $101,000 and $94,000 saved over 15 years. We collected a lot of data and suggested info from the day, which we will be discussing more as a group on Monday.