Week 9: Playtest 1 / Spring Break

16 March, 2014

Hello!  This week we ran our first official playtest and continued to develop our project.

Monday was a big day for us.  We were all very busy preparing for our first playtest with naive guests.  We ran two playtests with ten participants in each test.  We filmed the playtests and had the participants fill out a survey at the end of their test.  Here is some of the footage that we captured from the test:

We learned a lot from our playtests.  Most importantly, we learned that most people thought that our game was fun, but unfortunately we also learned that few fully understood what it was about.  We had anticipated both of these facts, but it was good to confirm them through external objective testers.

Next week is the Game Developer’s Conference and half of our team will be attending, so we continued to push through Spring Break to get as much done as we could.  The feedback from our playtest was great, and from that feedback we knew what we needed to do next.  We finalized the basic story for the game, and Jack began theming our User Interface.  The tech team began adjusting the back-end of our build to be adaptable for the events that occur in the story of our game.

We have also started preparing for our Halves Presentations.  With this playtest under our belt, we felt that we were ready to begin creating our presentation.  Everyone added their part, and once we get back from GDC, we will begin practicing the presentation as well.

Next week, while half of the team is at GDC, the rest of the team will continue to implement and test the story and events in our game.  We look forward to this next wave of feedback and testing.