GDC
This week, half of our team- Courtney, Rushil, and Aaron- traveled to California to attend GDC (Game Developers Conference)! Meanwhile, the other half of our team continued to iterate and playtest back in Pittsburgh.
Faculty Consultant Input
On Tuesday, we had a meeting with Shirley Saldamarco, our Faculty Consultant. She playtested the latest version of our experience, and gave us helpful feedback, mostly centered around Mage’s game.
She didn’t quite understand how to play Mage’s game- the UI was not clear, and she couldn’t tell that we were mixing fuel for a rocket, nor which icons were intended to be the buttons.
We had a long discussion about the purpose of Mage’s game, and came to the conclusion that the attempted combination of science and art was confusing- while we intended the main goal of the experience to be centered around color mixing, Shirely was focused on the scientific “meaning” behind each color (what do power, efficiency, and speed even mean?).
To remedy this, we talked in depth about how power, efficiency, and speed would be represented in our final launch animation. We would like to create many different animations to showcase the variety of combinations of power, efficiency, and speed, but decided this was out of scope- we only have the capacity to create one animation each (3 in total). We also talked about how players would even recognize that their launch was different based off of their fuel mix- should we show a “ghost animation” of the last launch so they could see the differences?
For now, we focused on fixing the UI of the game so players will easily understand what to do, and then discuss the other changes with the rest of the team when they get back.
Playtest with Kids!
On Wednesday, we playtested here at the ETC with a group of early high-school aged kids. Our past playtests at the Children’s Museum didn’t get us great feedback due to the combination of technical issues and the children being way younger than our target audience. In this sense, Wednesday’s playtest was great, since it was one of the first times we got to see our experience being played and enjoyed by kids.
The favorite game was Bil’s- kids had fun working with their friends to create chaos on the screen by hitting the shapes around. They particularly enjoyed breaking it by pushing shapes out of the boundaries- a new bug found which we will fix.
One big takeaway from this playtest was that players, especially young ones, will not take the time to read the dialogue from the Wonderbots and so we cannot rely on that for instructions. Instead, we need to add in more visual cues/instructions, and shorten the existing dialogue to be more digestible.
Now that we had the experience set up in our project room on a standalone TV/laptop, we have been keeping it on at almost all times. This has been very helpful and allowed us to get lots of constant playtesting done as peers or strangers walk past us in the hallway, see the experience, get curious, and step inside for a quick try.
Planning for Florida Playtest
On Saturday, we had a short call with our client Ian to finalize some details for our playtest at the Wonderlab next weekend. We are excited to go to Florida once again!
Priorities For Next Week:
- Design
- Rework dialogue to be shorter and simpler
- Programming
- Redo Won’s tutorial- kids just want to play immediately without being told what to do
- Fix various bugs found through playtesting
- Production
- Prepare for Wonderlab playtest