We had addressed the feedback we got from our playtesters. We had designed a new set of easier to understand level. While we knew there was still a good deal of polishing left to do, we felt we were close to our goal of a fun game that encouraged the viewer-broadcaster relationship. After showing it to the faculty at Softs, however, it looks like we might still have a lot of work ahead of us, both in terms of the game itself as well as the Twitch part.
It was hard to gauge reactions during Softs itself, but it seemed like people were enjoying the game. This was exactly the reaction we were hoping for, and that, combined with the positive feedback we received in our last playtest had us feeling confident that our game was hitting its goals in terms of engagement. We definitely noticed some frustration with interacting using the chat, so we knew we had some work to do before Finals. However, overall, it seemed like we were on a good track.
We got a lot of feedback on how to make it a real streaming/viewing experience. One of our clients’ biggest goals for this project was to have something in the game that would encourage the not just playing but viewing experience as well. We brainstormed many, many ways to do this, but it’s very hard to reliably measure this engagement. The idea is that we want to encourage people to give the player some useful/troll things in the game via the chat such that the items given helps the player in the game itself.
A lot of people who were not familiar with Twitch wanted to click on the screen to “interact”, which was something that a lot of people who were new to Twtich were doing. We identified that it was a concern, but from the APIs that Twitch has exposed, it was not possible yet to interact via clicking the screen. But we have researched this quite a bit and in the future YouTube is coming up with this kind of interaction paradigm.
So most of our work this week and next will be to address some of these concerns. We’re making the character move more smoothly and intuitively, we’re adding more challenging things for the player to do. We strongly believe that with these changes, as well as some additional polish and juiciness, we should have a game that is fun and addicting, and is in line with our client’s goal for this project.