Following what we learned from last week’s playtests, we decided to stick with our original three-phase design, but with some additional tweaks. First, we decided to lean into the individual nature of our game’s first phase and turn players’ race for followers an individual contest, making sure to track players’ follower counts via a publicly visible scoreboard. Second, we decided to shift our game’s third phase such that players would be split into two teams: one consisting of the top 20% of players with the most followers, and the other consisting of everyone else (we called these teams sensationalists and non-sensationalists, respectively). We would then have each sensationalist make a team with three non-sensationalists and collaboratively build three posts with the goal of flattering their country’s president into not launching nuclear missiles.
The next three days, we focused on a) updating our design document concerning Phase 3 and b) preparing for a paper playtest on Friday.
Once Friday rolled around, we had a series of meetings with our faculty advisors, during which we got another idea for a direction in which we could take our game’s third phase: players would not be split into teams coercively, but would instead each create posts that would collectively create flattering trends (and thereby distract the country’s president). Later that day, we conducted a set of two playtests (in which we tested out the team-based version of our game’s third phase), the results of which we will take into consideration as we move further into production.