Author: Shixi Zhang

Summary:

This week we are moving forward by inviting strangers to do playtests, receiving their feedback, figuring out new ideas, solving some uncertain questions during playtests, and attending the Center of Transformational Play design collective workshop. This week we are so proud that we made a huge progress. Moreover, in order to have inspiration, we as a team played a few board games together. That helps us a lot because we were all kind of stuck after the feedback session. After playing them, we found a brand new direction which we did not imagine would work. 

Playtest:

We asked the playtesters the questions we had for the current game setting. We observed that some of the playtesters were quiet and felt a little bit awkward talking to each other. Thus, we found out there must be some issues going on here and we decided to refine the current idea with a new method. 

We invited some of ETC students who are strangers to each other and also our instructor (Heather and Charles) to playtest. They all shared some brilliant feedback with us. 

Design: 

After the playtest, we all felt like we should refine the current design idea and narrative. We were inspired by a board game called “Remember Me”. In that game, it asks questions to all players and encourages them to remember other players’ answers. In that way, people will get more sense of each other and become friends. We found it is working pretty well among strangers and friends. Thus, we added a question phase to our game.

Design Collective Workshop:

We told our refined research and ideas to our client Elaine. We also invited other people in the workshop to playtest our paper prototype. The process was pretty smooth and we also observed some reactions when the playtesters played it. Almost all of them are a little bit nervous while they are waiting for other playtesters to guess which pattern most fits them.